Drone-Borne P-band Single-Pass InSAR

Abstract

This paper presents a high-accuracy single-pass drone-borne Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar System in the P-band (P-InSAR) for forest inventory, where ground and canopy heights are accurately determined. Full penetration is proven for a eucalyptus forest with a tree spacing of 2.5 m by 3.0 m, and the measured digital terrain accuracy is compared with well-known statistical models. Combining a C-band single-pass InSAR with P-InSAR, forest height is estimated with 5 % accuracy for forest inventory. Both surface and digital ground models are presented and compared with ground truth measurements.

Spiral SAR Imaging with Fast Factorized Back-Projection: A Phase Error Analysis

“…Qualitatively, Figures 10 and 12 appear to be almost identical to Figures 9 and 11, which may well indicate that this level of image quality is suitable for SAR processing. Indeed, in [23], the same drone-borne SAR system produced a high-accuracy forest inventory with SAR interferometry in the P-band. A 5% accuracy was possible thanks to the forest SNR being higher than 17 dB.…”

“…As can be seen, the trees on the eucalyptus plantation are easily recognized. If the same area was surveyed with a linear flight pattern, the resultant image would have a slant range resolution of 3 m and an azimuth resolution of 50 cm [23]. However, thanks to the 360 • acquisition, the resolution across all directions in the (x, y) plane was at least 50 cm.…”

“…The case study comprised SAR data from a drone-borne SAR system [22,23] that flew over a eucalyptus plantation with a spiral flight pattern. Figure 7 displays a Google Earth image of the drone trajectory over the imaged area; the eucalyptus plantation can be seen on the bottom left.…”

“…The purpose was to test the hypothesis that geometric parameters at the beginning of processing can predict the phase error standard deviation of the output image. The data set for testing this hypothesis comprised processing results for a spiral flight path performed by a multiband drone-borne SAR system [22,23]. The collected P-band SAR data were processed with the BP and FFBP algorithms to produce 2D and 3D images.…”

Close-Range Remote Sensing of Forests: The state of the art, challenges, and opportunities for systems and data acquisitions

“…Low-frequency ultrawideband (UWB) millimeter radar has good penetration capacity and offers potential for imaging building interiors. Previous demonstrations of UAV SAR include the P, L, and C bands [212] for civil and deformation monitoring applications; X band [213] for calculating the scattering characteristics of complex targets; P and C bands for estimating the terrain height of a eucalyptus forest [214]; UWB [215] for snow coverage scanning; and W band [216] to minimize the size and weight of the hardware, among others, and different or full polarization combinations, e.g., horizontal and vertical backscatters.…”