A polarimetric vegetation model to retrieve particle and orientation distribution characteristics

A simple vegetation model for polarimetric covariance and coherency matrix elements is presented. The model aims to represent vegetation characteristics which are observable by radar polarimetry, including the average particle scattering anisotropy, the main orientation of the volume, the degree of orientation randomness in the volume, and the terrain slopes. The goal of this approach is to quantify these parameters and to enable their estimation in a remote sensing parameter inversion framework. The retrieval of parameters related to effective particle shapes in the polarization plane and the orientation distribution characteristics is evaluated on real SAR data acquired by DLR's E-SAR system at L-band.