Assessment of the Potential of H/A/Alpha Decomposition for Polarimetric Interferometric SAR Data

Abstract

This paper presents an extension of H/A/Alpha polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) decomposition for polarimetric interferometric SAR (PolInSAR) images, and introduces new parameters using both polarimetric and interferometric data. These parameters provide more information than extracted parameters from H/A/Alpha PolSAR decomposition. The new parameters significantly increase the potential of PolSAR data for, for example, forest and oriented building discrimination. With the availability of interferometric information in addition to PolSAR information, there is the possibility to reduce the entropy of PolSAR data. The relationship between the entropy of PolInSAR decomposition and coherence between images has also been shown. E-SAR PolInSAR L-band data of Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, Northern Sweden, and Goermin, Germany are used to validate the H/A/Alpha PolInSAR decomposition. The experimental results on the first data set, including agricultural, forest, and urban areas, show that this decomposition has a better performance than the standard H/A/Alpha decomposition method in oriented urban areas with large orientation angle, for example. Also, the results on the second data set of a forest area show that the PolInSAR decomposition has more reasonable and superior performance over the PolSAR decomposition. The forest and nonforest regions can be correctly discriminated by using the presented PolInSAR parameters. Finally, in the last data set, the better detection of the agricultural crops and fields boundaries is provided by the proposed method.