Forest height inversion based on polarimetric SAR interferometry

To extract the forest height accurately and quickly based on polarimetric SAR interferometry, a forest height inversion method is proposed, based on the polarimetric interferometric model (PolIn-model). A credit (linearity measurement) of height inversion is introduced. For each pixel with high credit, the complex volume coherence gamma_v is estimated by the ESPRIT algorithm, and then the forest height is estimated by a pre-calculated look-up table according to the PolIn-model. Otherwise, the forest height is estimated by the ESPRIT algorithm directly. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed linearity measurement is more effective compared to the traditional way and the location of the volume coherence is in accordance with the PolIn-model. The time consumption by the proposed method is decreased to 25% of that by the PolIn-model based method.