Multibaseline Polinsar Module for Sar Data Processing and Analysis in Rat (radar Tools)

The combination of SAR Polarimetry (POLSAR) and SAR Interferometry (InSAR) into Polarimetric SAR Interferometry (POLInSAR) has shown great potential for information extraction from SAR data. Applications have been developed and validated theoretically for POLInSAR data. But due to different reasons these methods are difficult to apply on real data. The SAR observables have to be increased, and the utilization of multiple baselines (MB) is one of the possibilities. There will be a need for data processing and analysis methods and tools to work effectively with multibaseline datasets. In this paper we present the newly developed module for the software package RAT (Radar Tools), which provides these abilities for multibaseline polarimetric interferometric SAR data. It is the first available package of tools for working with MBSAR data. RAT (RAdar Tools [1], [2]) is a collection of tools for advanced image processing of SAR remote sensing data, originally started as a student’s project and currently under further development at the Department of Computer Vision and Remote Sensing of the Technical University of Berlin. It is programmed in IDL (Interactive Data Language) and uses IDL widgets as graphical user interface. The purpose of this paper is also to give an overview of the current development status of RAT through addressing the newest structural improvements in RAT as well as recently implemented methods for SAR polarimetry and interferometry.