Extraction of surface parameters from multi-frequency and polarimetric SAR data

The aim of this paper is to analyse the information contained in multi-frequency and polarimetric SAR data for an accurate retrieval of surface geophysical parameters. A two-scale surface scattering model is presented with the aim to develop an inversion algorithm. This model is represented by projection into a three-dimensional space defined by the H-A-/spl alpha/_parameters, which permits, for each observation frequency value, to obtain distinct curves with respect to the soil moisture content and large-scale roughness. Then, a comparison between multi-frequency and polarimetric data from the JRC laboratory and the two-scale surface polarimetric response is carried out. At last, two different multi-frequency parameter inversion methods based on artificial neural networks schemes are proposed.