Recent advances in polarimetric-interferometric SAR theory and technology and its application

The development of radar polarimetry and radar interferometry is advancing rapidly. Whereas with radar polarimetry the textural fine-structure, target orientation, symmetries and material constituents can be recovered with considerable improvement above that of standard “amplitude-only” radar, with radar interferometry the spatial (in depth) structure can be explored. In “polarimetric interferometric synthetic aperture radar (POL-IN-SAR) imaging”, it is possible to recover such co-registered textural and spatial information from POL-IN-SAR digital image data sets simultaneously, including the extraction of digital elevation maps (DEM) from either polarimetric (scattering matrix) or interferometric (single platform: dual antenna) SAR systems. Simultaneous polarimetric-plus-interferometric SAR offers the additional benefit of obtaining co-registered textural-plus-spatial three-dimensional POL-IN-DEM information, which, when applied to repeat-pass image-overlay interferometry, provides differential background validation, stress assessment and environmental stress-change information with high accuracy. Then, either designing “multiple dual-polarization antenna POL-IN-SAR” systems or applying advanced “POL-IN-SAR image compression techniques” will result in “POLarimetric TOMOgraphic (multi-interferometric) SAR” or “POL-TOMO-SAR” imaging. This is of direct relevance to wide-area, dynamic battle-space surveillance and local-to-global environmental background validation, stress assessment and stress-change monitoring of terrestrial and planetary surface covers