Comparative Analysis of Forest Biomass Estimation using SAR Tomographic Techniques

The objective of this study is to assess and compare different above-ground biomass (AGB) estimation models for tropical forest using P-band SAR tomography. In this paper, we investigate (1) comparative performance of back-projection and Capon beamforming tomographic estimators to analyze the vertical structure of tropical forest 2) impact of terrain slope correction on tomogram reflectivity and AGB estimates 3) correlation of tomogram reflectivity at 30m to forest AGB using different models 4) possibility of using tomographic retrieved height to improve the AGB estimation. The performance of these models is evaluated using dataset acquired during TropiSAR 2009 by ONERA over the Paracou site.