Abstract
The overestimation of volume scattering (OVS) is an intrinsic drawback in model-based polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) target decomposition. It severely impacts the accuracy measurement of scattering power and leads to scattering mechanism ambiguity. In this paper, a hierarchical extended general four-component scattering power decomposition method (G4U) is presented. The conventional G4U is first proposed by Singh et al. and it has advantages in full use of information and volume scattering characterization. However, the OVS still exists in the G4U and it causes a scattering mechanism ambiguity in some oriented urban areas. In the proposed method, matrix rotations by the orientation angle and the helix angle are applied. Afterwards, the transformed coherency matrix is applied to the four-component decomposition scheme with two refined models. Moreover, the branch condition applied in the G4U is substituted by the ratio of correlation coefficient (RCC), which is used as a criterion for hierarchically implementing the decomposition. The performance of this approach is demonstrated and evaluated with the Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (AIRSAR), Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), Radarsat-2, and the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) fully polarimetric data over different test sites. Comparison studies are carried out and demonstrated that the proposed method exhibits promising improvements in the OVS and scattering mechanism characterization.
Highlights
With the maturation of high-resolution radar imaging and polarization measuring technique, polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) rises in response to the proper time and conditions, leading to a high-tide period of PolSAR research for the past two decades
The results reported here are derived from the Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (AIRSAR), Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), Radarsat-2, and the Advanced
Due to the high variability of urban landscape and its wide variety of constructions, their polarimetric scattering mechanisms are more complicated with respect to natural areas
Summary
With the maturation of high-resolution radar imaging and polarization measuring technique, polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) rises in response to the proper time and conditions, leading to a high-tide period of PolSAR research for the past two decades. Among these studies, incoherent target decomposition is one of the hottest branches, which has spawned attention from scholars of PolSAR field to a great extent [1,2,3,4]. The existing incoherent target decomposition methods can be classified into three categories, namely, model-based, eigenvalue-based, and hybrid decomposition categories. Our paper is focused on the first category, i.e., the model-based decomposition
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