Polsar Tomographic Techniques Using Surface Slope Parameters in Urban Areas

In this paper a Polarimetric SAR Tomographic (Pol-TomoSAR) technique, exploiting the local contextual information in small neighborhoods surrounding each range-azimuth pixel, is applied to fully polarimetric multi-baseline images of an urban area. In particular, the considered technique is based on the assumption that the pixels belonging to a neighborhood are located on a locally planar surface, whose slopes can be estimated for each range-azimuth pixel from the surrounding neighboring data. This assumption well adapts to urban areas, where the height profile can be well approximated by planes. In this way, the correlation among the heights of neighboring pixels can be taken into account for improving the accuracy of the height profile reconstruction. Preliminary results on fully polarization SAR data are presented.