Alberto Alonso-González

Dual-polarimetric agricultural change analysis of long baseline TanDEM-X time series data

The standard TanDEM-X baselines have been designed to optimize the high resolution global Digital Elevation Model (DEM) generation. However, during the Science Phase of the mission longer baselines are available. This allows interferometric measurements with a higher vertical sensitivity, more appropriate for agricultural applications, where the crop heights are too small to be properly detected and analyzed with the standard baselines. This paper evaluates the use of the experimental long baseline TanDEM-X acquisitions for the monitoring of the agricultural changes in dual-pol single-pass interferometric time series.

Agricultural monitoring with polarimetric SAR time series

This paper describes the monitoring of agricultural crops and their evolution with Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) time series. SAR polarimetry is very useful for this task due to its sensitivity to the plant structure. A polarimetric change analysis is proposed in order to detect and characterize the observed differences between two acquisitions. This analysis is able to determine the types of scattering that increase or decrease among acquisitions, which allows a better interpretation of the change. Then, the proposed technique is evaluated with the AgriSAR 2006 dataset in order to verify the results and compare them with the ground measurements.

Processing polarimetric SAR time series over urban areas with binary partition trees

This paper addresses the processing of temporal series of Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) data for urban areas employing the Binary Partition Tree (BPT) representation. Instead of working directly with the original pixels of the data, a hierarchical region-based representation is employed. Thanks to the multi-scale properties of the BPT, the data may be decomposed into a set of homogeneous regions corresponding to the different observed temporal evolutions, while preserving the contours and small details of the scene. Then, this information is employed in order to detect and interpret the changes over the urban areas. The technique is evaluated with RADARSAT-2 PolSAR time series data over Barcelona, Spain.