Recent Advances in POL-SAR & POL-IN-SAR Imaging of Natural Habitats and Wetland Remote Sensing

Land cover monitoring is one of the most potential applications of Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (POLSAR) sensing and so is Repeat-Pass Polarimetric-Interferometric SAR (RP-DIFF-POL-IN-SAR) stress-change assessment for air/high-altitude/space-borne SAR sensor deployment. Provided fully polarimetric SAR information can be made available, a plethora of novel POLSAR matrixde composition methods can be implemented for recovering rather precise scattering contributions from isolated and distributed scattering scenarios, and so can rather exact environmental changes from consecutive repeat-pass observations. With the recent launches of the fully polarimetric satellites JAXA-ALOS (PAL-SAR-L), the DLR TerraSAR-X and RADASAT-2 (C), a new era in space imaging of the terrestrial terrain and ocean surfaces has arrived providing unforeseen advantages. Whereas in the past, POLSAR applications were focused mainly on information product gathering for agriculture, forestry and the fisheries, little emphasis was placed on demonstrating its full capacity also for the assessment of natural habitats and especially wetlands. Therefore, it is essential to demonstrate how seasonal changes and features of vegetation in natural habitats, shallow vegetated lakes and wetlands can be recovered, provided fully polarimetric SAR image data takes can be made available for full polarimetric scattering matrix acquisition for which the standard symmetry condition HV=VH may not necessarily be sufficient.