Vertical Superresolution Methods for Interferometric Radar Imaging
Mr. Clint Slatton
UT Austin
Friday, August 20th, 2:00 PM, ENS 602
slatton@ece.utexas.edu
Abstract
Measuring surface topography over large terrain areas to assess
natural hazard threats posed by seismic and flooding processes is a critical,
international need. Mapping surface faults in seismically active
regions and shallow drainage pathways in coastal and riparian lowlands are
just two of the important geological and hydrological applications that
require high-resolution measurements of topography. The most important
unsolved problem in determining topography from remote sensing is that
observations are not measurements of true surface topography for vegetated areas. Instead, the measurements, which depend on the sensor and the
vegetation, represent some height above the true surface. I propose to extend a recently developed Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) parameter estimation
technique to separate the surface elevations and vegetation heights
from Interferometric SAR (INSAR) observations. A more accurate
representation of the surface scattering will be formulated, and a contextual model will be utilized to obtain improved estimates of surface and vegetation
heights. I also propose to develop an approach for combining SAR and
laser altimeter (LIDAR) data to further improve estimates of
vegetation heights. The new approach will be applied to both simulated and
airborne SAR/LIDAR data acquired by NASA. All of the data required to conduct
the proposed research have already been acquired over several test sites.
A list of Telecommunications and Signal Processing Seminars is available at
from the ECE department Web pages under "Seminars".
The Web address for the Telecommunications and Signal Processing Seminars is
http://anchovy.ece.utexas.edu/seminars