Evaluation of the ESPRIT approach in polarimetric interferometric SAR

This paper presents a first evaluation of the ESPRIT approach in polarimetric interferometric SAR. This evaluation is carried out by using 3D images obtained by SAR tomographic like an alternative to the acquisition of ground-truth data, which is an extremely complex task in the case of volume areas. All parameters over a volumetric area are directly visible in a tomographic image and can, therefore, be employed to validate the ESPRIT approach by comparing parameters generated by ESPRIT and the SAR tomography approach. This allows to identify the principal deficiencies of the ESPRIT method, which occur over high vegetation areas, where there is a misinterpretation of the ESPRIT results. Whereas, the ESPRIT approach is useful for building characterisation, identifying a good applicability area. Airborne L-band repeat-pass interferometric data of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) experimental airborne SAR are used to perform this evaluation.