FOREST HEIGHT ESTIMATION from POLINSAR IMAGE USING COHERENCE SET and CANCELLATION of SCATTERING MECHANISMS

Forest height is one of the most important forest vertical structure parameter for many forest management and monitoring activities. Recently, great number of methods have been proposed for the forest height estimation using PolInSAR data, such as ESPRIT, three-stage inversion method but these methods tend to underestimate the forest height due to attenuation of the electromagnetic waves in the medium. This paper proposes a method to improve the accuracy of forest height estimation by combining the mean coherent set theory and cancellation of scattering mechanisms. The proposed method performance is evaluated with simulated data acquired by PolSARProSim software. Experimental results indicate that the accuracy of forestry parameter determination is improved. © 2018 IEEE.