Radiometric Correction of Airborne Radar Images Over Forested Terrain With Topography
Abstract
Radiometric correction of radar images is essential to produce accurate estimates of biophysical parameters related to forest structure and biomass. We present a new algorithm to correct radiometry for 1) terrain topography and 2) variations of canopy reflectivity with viewing and tree-terrain geometry. This algorithm is applicable to radar images spanning a wide range of incidence angles over terrain with significant topography and can also take into account aircraft attitude, antenna steering angle, and target geometry. The approach includes elements of both homomorphic and heteromorphic terrain corrections to correct for topographic effects and is followed by an additional radiometric correction to compensate for variations of canopy reflectivity with viewing and tree-terrain geometry. The latter correction is based on lookup tables and enables derivation of biophysical parameters irrespective of viewing geometry and terrain topography. We evaluate the performance of the new algorithm with airborne radar data and show that it performs better than classical homomorphic methods followed by cosine-based corrections.
Additional Information
© 2016 IEEE. Manuscript received May 24, 2015; revised August 14, 2015, November 5, 2015, and February 11, 2016; accepted March 8, 2016. Date of publication April 5, 2016; date of current version June 1, 2016. This work was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This work was supported by NASA's Terrestrial Ecology Program (WBS 281945.02.61.03.26).Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 70950
- DOI
- 10.1109/TGRS.2016.2543142
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20161007-103048216
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- WBS 281945.02.61.03.26
- NASA
- Created
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2016-10-12Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-11Created from EPrint's last_modified field