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PhD Thesis

        Title : Estimation and classification of altimetric signals Download the document
        Direction : Jean-Yves Tourneret
        Description :

    After having scanned the ocean levels during thirteen years, the french/american satellite Topex-Poséidon disappeared in 2005. Topex-Poséidon was replaced by Jason-1 in december 2001 and a new satellite Jason-2 is waited for 2008. Several estimation methods have been developed for signals resulting from these satellites. In particular, estimators of the sea height and wave height have shown very good performance when they are applied on waveforms backscattered from ocean surfaces. However, it is a more challenging problem to extract relevant information from signals backscattered from non-oceanic surfaces such as inland waters, deserts or ices.

This PhD thesis is divided into two parts :
  • A first direction consists of developing classification methods for altimetric signals in order to recognize the type of surface affected by the radar waveform. In particular, a specific attention will be devoted to support vector machines (SVMs) and functional data analysis for this problem.
  • The second part of this thesis consists of developing estimation algorithms appropriate to altimetric signals obtained after reflexion on non-oceanic surfaces. Bayesian algorithms are currently under investigation for this estimation problem.
This PhD is co-supervised by the french society CLS (Collect Localisation Satellite) (see http://www.cls.fr/ for more details) which will in particular provide the real altimetric data necessary for this study.

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