2019 Volume E102.B Issue 7 Pages 1345-1350
This paper presents a conifer and broad-leaf tree classification scheme that processes high resolution polarimetric synthetic aperture data above X-band. To validate the proposal, fully polarimetric measurements are conducted in a precisely controlled environment to examine the difference between the scattering mechanisms of conifer and broad-leaf trees at 15GHz. With 3.75cm range resolution, scattering matrices of two tree types were measured by a vector network analyzer. Polarimetric analyses using the 4-component scattering power decomposition and alpha-bar angle of eigenvalue decomposition yielded clear distinction between the two tree types. This scheme was also applied to an X-band Pi-SAR2 data set. The results confirm that it is possible to distinguish between tree types using fully polarimetric and high-resolution data above X-band.
