Estimation of the terrain surface azimuthal/range slopes using polarimetric decomposition of POLSAR data

The estimation of geophysical parameters, such as surface roughness, soil moisture, etc., is often affected by the terrain elevation. To correct the polarimetric effects caused by terrain having significant relief, it is necessary to introduce a remote sensing technique which is directly capable of estimating terrain surface slopes both in the azimuthal and ground-range directions. The target vector used during this procedure is defined from a new scheme for parameterising polarimetric scattering problems, which has application in the quantitative analysis of polarimetric SAR data. The method relies on an eigenvalue analysis of the coherency matrix and employs a 3-level Bernoulli statistical model to generate estimates of the average target scattering matrix parameters from the data. Based on the original idea proposed by Schuler et al., a new remote sensing technique using the average target parameters, derived from the polarimetric decomposition, produces profiles of “terrain” slopes both in the azimuthal and ground-range directions