Unmixing Polarimetric Radar Images Based on Land Cover Type Identified by Higher Resolution Optical Data Before Target Decomposition: Application to Forest and Bare Soil

Abstract

Extracting information from a polarimetric radar representation usually consists in decomposing it with target decomposition algorithms. This first step can be seen as a geometric analysis of the polarimetric information: the identification of physical radar scattering mechanisms. The problem is that average physical parameters are estimated. As a consequence, these parameters might not describe correctly any of the land cover types that can be mixed together into the radar resolution cell. Therefore, using the polarimetric parameters for land cover classification is challenging. The novelty of the method is to propose a thematic analysis of the polarimetric information preceding the geometric one. The objective is to assess if splitting off polarimetric information on a land cover type basis before applying usual target decomposition algorithms can produce more consistent radar scattering mechanisms when land cover classes are mixed inside the radar resolution cell. A cooperative fusion framework in which very high-resolution optical images are used to unmix physical radar scattering mechanisms is proposed. For bare soil and forests, we point out that a linear unmixing model applied to the covariance matrix is able to split off polarimetric information on a land cover type basis. The assessment of the unmixed radar matrices is carried out with polarimetric radar images from the Radarsat-2 satellite. It was found that despite speckle, the reconstructed radar information after the unmixing process is statistically relevant with the observations. The question whether the unmixed radar images contain relevant thematic information is more challenging, but results tend to validate this property. This method could be used to have a better estimation of vegetation biomass in the context of open forested areas.