Multiscale adaptive estimation for fusing interferometric radar and laser altimeter data

Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (INSAR) data are fused with laser altimeter (LIDAR) data to produce improved estimates of bare-surface topography and vegetation heights. The data from both sensors are first transformed into estimates of surface elevations and vegetation heights to obtain linear measurement-state relations. A spatially-adaptive multiscale estimation framework is then used to combine the data, which were acquired at different resolutions. The estimation is performed in scale and space via a set of Kalman filters. It yields better error characteristics than the nonadaptive multiscale filter and accommodates non-stationarity in the image data