First study on holographic SAR tomography over agricultural crops at C-/X-band

Recently, the 3-D backscattering distribution of forests and ice bodies has been factor of study with the HoloSAR imaging mode, showing its capabilities to obtain 3-D imaging reconstructions of volumes over 360° at very high resolution. In this paper, the first assessment of agricultural crops in the holographic SAR tomography (HoloSAR) mode is presented. The goal of this research is to investigate the retrieval of the three-dimensional backscattering of crop fields as a function of the azimuthal aspect angle and the tomographic constellation. To that end, a HoloSAR campaign was conducted at X-/C-band by DLR's F-SAR sensor in Wallerfing, Germany. The experimental results of this study show 2-D and 3-D polarimetric images, where the co-polar phase is analyzed qualitatively giving some indications about the kind of scattering mechanisms.