Recent Advances in Polarimetry and Polarimetric Interferometry

Radar polarimetry radar Interferometry and polarimetric SAR interferometry represent the current culmination in 'microwave remote sensing' technology, but we still need to progress very considerably in order to reach the limits of physical realizability. Whereas with radar polarimetry the textural fine-structure, target orientation, symmetries and material constituents can be recovered with considerable improvement above that of standard 'amplitude-only' radar; by implementing 'radar interferometry' the spatial (in depth) structure can be explored. With polarimetric interferometric synthetic aperture radar (POL-IN-SAR) imaging, it is possible to recover such co-registered textural and spatial information from POL-IN-SAR digital image data sets simultaneously, including the extraction of digital elevation maps (DEM) from either polarimetric (scattering matrix) or interferometric (dual antenna) SAR systems. Simultaneous polarimetric-plus-interferometric SAR imaging offers the additional benefit of obtaining co-registered textural-plus-spatial three-dimensional POL-IN-DEM information, which when applied to repeat-pass image-overlay interferometry provides differential background validation and environmental stress-change information with highly improved accuracy. Then, by either designing multiple dual polarization antenna POL-IN-SAR systems or by applying advanced POL-IN-SAR image compression techniques, will result in 'POL-arimetric TOMO-graphic' (multi-interferometric) SAR or POL-TOMO-SAR imaging. By advancing these EWB-D-POL-IN/TOMO-SAR imaging modes, we are slowly but steadily approaching the ultimate goal of eventually realizing airborne and spaceborne 'geo-environmental background validation, stress assessment, and stress-change monitoring and wide-area military surveillance of the terrestrial and planetary covers'.