Conference Agenda

Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems have greatly advanced remote sensing by providing high-resolution, all-weather, day-and-night imaging capabilities, enabling detailed analysis of Earth’s surface features. Among emerging SAR techniques, Polarimetric SAR Tomography (PolTomSAR) has proven highly effective for reconstructing three-dimensional representations of forests, urban landscapes, and natural terrains by exploiting multi-polarization and multi-baseline acquisitions. This study presents the application of PolTomSAR for forest vertical structure estimation using L-band UAVSAR datasets acquired during NASA’s AfriSAR airborne campaign. The selected data correspond to the Rabi Forest region in Gabon, collected on June 15, 2015, with an azimuth resolution of 1.5 m and a range resolution of 12 m. Advanced tomographic inversion algorithms, including classical beamforming and adaptive Capon spectral estimation methods, were applied to resolve vertical scattering mechanisms within the forest canopy. The reconstructed tomographic profiles indicate an average forest height of approximately 31 m, consistent with the characteristics of dense tropical vegetation. Validation was performed using a Digital Surface Model (DSM) derived from LiDAR point cloud data acquired by the Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor (LVIS), showing strong agreement with PolTomSAR-based estimates. The results demonstrate the robustness of SAR tomography for detailed forest height mapping and three-dimensional canopy characterization, highlighting its potential for large-scale forest monitoring, biomass estimation, and climate-related ecosystem studies.