Terrain Mapping of a Tropical Rainforest with Dual-Polarimetric P-Band InSAR Backscatter-Phase Histograms

We employ dual-polarimetric P-band interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) backscatter-phase histograms of the Amazon rainforest of Urucu to estimate the elevation of the forest terrain. High-resolution single-look phase and phase-height histograms weighted by backscatter intensity are projected in the elevation direction and are combined in the range and azimuth directions to form a three-dimensional backscatter-phase histogram. Profiles of the resulting histograms resemble forest reflectivity. Higher ground backscatter is observed in the P-HH compared to the P-HV profile, in agreement with scattering models. Results suggest that the peak of the difference between the normalized P-HH and P-HV profiles can be used as an estimator for the terrain elevation from a model-free approach. We qualitatively compare the results to traditional P-band interferometry and polarimet-ric InSAR (PolInSAR) random-volume over ground (RVoG) three-stage approach over five different baselines 20m, 65m, 80m, 100m, and 145m.