Polarimetric SAR applications demonstration
This European Space Agency (ESA) funded project aims at evaluating and demonstrating the importance of quad-polarimetric SAR data for a wide range of remote sensing applications and to generate appropriate demonstration examples and showcases to be used in a dedicated ESA TM publication.
In order to cover the whole range of remote sensing applications the project is organised into five thematic domains: Forest, Agriculture, Cryosphere, Urban and Ocean. Within each domain hazard applications are treated. For each thematic domain two main objectives are followed:
- Identification of applications for which the availability of quad-polarimetric SAR data bring unique benefits and/or significant performance improvements when compared to single- or dual- (including compact- ) polarimetric data.
- Demonstration of the benefits/improvements induced by polarimetry by implementing the applications, applying them on suitable, if possible space-borne, SAR data and validating their performance against reference data available for each case.
An important component of the project is the integration of the implemented applications in PolSARpro and the generation of the appropriate demonstration examples for demonstration and educational purposes. Finally the evaluated applications, the implemented applications and the generated showcases should finally integrated in ESA’s TM publication “Principles and Applications of Pol-InSAR”.
The team provides leading, unique and up-to-date expertise SAR polarimetry (Pol-SAR) and polarimetric interferometry (Pol-InSAR) techniques and applications in all required scientific fields and application domains which allow to address effectively and efficiently the requirements of the project.
The partners of the project are: the DLR Microwaves and Radar Institute DLR-HR (Germany), the Universidad de Alicante UdA, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich ETH (Switzerland), Applied Electromagnetic Consultants (UK), the Institut d’Électronique et de Télécommunications de Rennes IETR (France), ONERA (France) & the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech UPC (Spain).
Top image: Radarsat-2 Pauli RGB image of the Key River area in Alberta (Canada).