Variational Learning of Mixture Wishart Model for PolSAR Image Classification

Abstract

The phase difference, amplitude product, and amplitude ratio between two polarizations are important discriminators for terrain classification, which derives a significant statistical-distribution-based polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification. Traditionally, statistical-distribution-based PolSAR image classification models pay attention to two aspects: searching for a suitable distribution to model certain PolSAR image and a satisfactory solution for the corresponding distribution model with samples in every terrain. Usually, the described distribution form is too complicated to build. Besides, inaccurate parameter estimation may lead to poor classification performance for PolSAR image. In order to refrain from this phenomenon, a variational thought is adopted for the statistical-distribution-based PolSAR classification method in this paper. First, a mixture Wishart model is built to model the PolSAR image to replace the complicated distribution for the PolSAR image. Second, a learning-based method is suggested instead of inaccurate point estimation of parameters to determine the distribution for every class in the mixture Wishart model. Finally, the proposed learning-based mixture Wishart model will be built as a variational form to realize a parametric model for PolSAR image classification. In the experiments, it will be proved that the class centers are easier to distinguish among different terrains learned from the proposed variational model. In addition, a classification performance on the PolSAR image is superior to the original point estimation Wishart model on both visual classification result and accuracy.