A Modified H−α Classification Method for DCP Compact Polarimetric Mode by Reconstructing Quad H and α Parameters From Dual Ones

Abstract

Nowadays, compact polarimetry (CP), because of its great advantages, is considered as a suitable alternative to full polarimetry (FP). One of the important issues in the field of CP is directed toward extracting FP information from CP data as much as possible. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for reconstructing quad H and α parameters from dual circular polarization (DCP) compact data without reconstructing whole FP data. Consequently, it can reduce the time cost, data storage and errors introduced during the Pseudo-FP reconstruction process. We show that the proposed method performs well regarding discrimination of different physical scattering mechanisms and reconstruction of quad H and α parameters. The superiority of the new method compared with the alternatives is examined using a dataset consists of a variety of SAR sensors, frequencies and scenes with different scattering mechanisms.