3D coastal bathymetry reconstruction using TOPSAR data

Coastal bathymetry is considered to provide key parameters for coastal engineering and coastal navigation. In this paper we address the question of reducing the effect of speckle on the accuracy of depth determination in coastal waters using TOPSAR multi-polarized data without needing to include any sounding data values. In doing so, two three-dimensional surface models, the Volterra model and a fuzzy B-Spline model, which construct a global topological structure between the data points, were used to support an approximation to the real surface. The statistical differences between real bathymetry map, C_VV band and L_HH band showed that the best reconstruction of coastal bathymetry was obtained with polarised L and C bands SAR acquired with HH and VV polarizations, respectively. With 10 m spatial resolution of TOPSAR data, bias of -0.04 and the standard error mean of 0.05 m in depth determination was obtained with L_HH band.