Boreal forest tree height estimation from interferometric TanDEM-X images

Author

Praks, Jaan ; Hallikainen, Martti ; Antropov, Oleg ; Molina, Daniel

Author_Institution

Sch. of Electr. Eng., Aalto Univ., Helsinki, Finland

fYear

2012

fDate

22-27 July 2012

Firstpage

1262

Lastpage

1265

Abstract

The paper describes algorithm development for tree height retrieval in the boreal forest zone from TanDEM-X interferometric imagery. A set of 8 TanDEM-X pairs was acquired during summer and autumn 2011 over southern Finland in order to evaluate the potential tree height retrieval performance for this space-borne instrument. Another focus of the study was evaluation of seasonal dependence of interferometric signature of boreal forest. The obtained results are compared to our previous studies on tree height retrieval with the airborne DLR E-SAR instrument in the same area. The obtained results show good potential of TanDEM-X in forest mapping when external terrain elevation model is available, though accuracy seems to be somewhat lower compared to airborne instruments due to increased noise.

Keywords

geophysical techniques; geophysics computing; remote sensing; vegetation; AD 2011; TanDEM-X pairs; airborne DLR E-SAR instrument; algorithm development; boreal forest interferometric signature; boreal forest tree height estimation; external terrain elevation model; interferometric TANDEM-X images; potential tree height retrieval performance; southern Finland; space-borne instrument; Atmospheric modeling; Interferometry; Laser radar; Mathematical model; Remote sensing; Scattering; Vegetation; SAR interferometry; boreal forest; random volume over ground model; tree height estimation;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2012 IEEE International

Conference_Location

Munich

ISSN

2153-6996

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-1160-1

Electronic_ISBN

2153-6996

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IGARSS.2012.6351309

Filename

6351309