The next European Space Agency (ESA) Earth Explorer mission BIOMASS will acquire Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data to help characterizing carbon fluxes in densely vegetated areas. The ESA-sponsored AfriSAR campaign was designed to collect data from African tropical forests in order to support the future BIOMASS mission. It was conducted in two parts over the tropical forests of Gabon, by ONERA in July 2015 and by DLR in Febuary 2016. This paper addresses the potential of tomographic SAR for retrieving vegetation parameters from the multibaseline P-band airborne data acquired by ONERA over the forest of La Lopé. It is shown that a correction of phase disturbances (phase screens) is necessary before tomographic analysis. Under the hypothesis of phase screens resulting only from inaccurancies in the platform motion, a correction procedure based on recent works from Tebaldini et al. is detailed and applied. The tomographic profiles after correction are shown to present good correspondances with the available LIDAR data.

Second-harmonic generation microscopy can provide estimation of some local molecule distribution properties. However, in order not to get erroneous conclusions, it is important to detect measurements with insufficient precision. Such a detection technique is developed considering an approximation of the ultimate precision provided by the Cramer-Rao bound. This method is characterized and a simple approximation of its detection and false alarm probabilities is developed.

The estimation of parameters in polarization-resolved two-photon microscopy response perturbed by photon noise is analyzed in the context of second harmonic generation for the distribution of molecules presenting cylindrical symmetry. The estimation task is investigated using the Cramer-Rao lower bound for Poisson photon noise. It is shown that a noniterative technique can lead to estimation results that have good efficiencies for most of the physical possible values of the sample parameters for sufficiently high photon levels. The trade-off, between the number of incident polarization states and the total number of measured photons, that can be obtained with the Cramer-Rao lower bound is also discussed.

The theory of the intrinsic coherence, originally developed for 2D fields, is generalized in order to analyze coherence properties of light with a polarization that can fluctuate in three dimensions. Several notions, such as the concept of mean-square coherence and the capacity to describe irreversible behaviors, are demonstrated and illustrated with the example of light in 3D disordered media with frozen and nonfrozen disorders.