SAR2Canopy: A Framework Integrating Scattering Model With Neural Networks for Canopy Height Estimation From Airborne P-Band SAR Data

Researchers in the fields of ecological environment and remote sensing pay considerable attention to the estimation of forest canopy height with synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The interest is due to the ability of SAR to penetrate the forest canopy and its sensitivity to forest properties through backscattered intensity. Recent advances in deep learning (DL) present the possibility to derive canopy height maps from single high-resolution (HR) SAR images using neural networks. SAR2Canopy, an innovative framework, is proposed in this paper for canopy height estimation based, which incorporates sensor and scattering knowledge into the estimation. The integration framework allows for the merging of reconstruction trunk scattering features by an equivalent dihedral corner reflector (DCR) scattering model into the supervised tree height estimation process. The proposed method attempts a new approach combining the physical characteristics of SAR data with the nonlinear feature learning ability of DL, potentially extending to different DL algorithms. Experiments are conducted with airborne fully polarimetric P-band SAR data from two areas. Compared to the baseline models, including UNet, DeepLabV3_ResNet50, and FCN_ResNet50, the proposed SAR2Canopy integrated with the DCR model achieves an increase of up to 13.66% in the coefficient of determination (<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">R</i><sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup>), while reducing the root mean squared error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) by as much as 14.59% and 20.69%, respectively.