Scattering Mechanism Extraction by a Modified Cloude-Pottier Decomposition for Dual Polarization SAR

Remote Sensing

Kefeng Ji¹  Yonghui Wu²  Nicolas Baghdadi³ 

[1] College of Electronics Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China;Early Warning Academy, Wuhan 430019, China; E-Mail:;id="af1-remotesensing-07-07447">1College of Electronics Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, Chi

关键词: polarimetry;    dual polarization;    synthetic aperture radar (SAR);    scattering mechanism;    target decomposition;   

DOI  :  10.3390/rs70607447

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Dual polarization is a typical operational mode of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR). However, few studies have considered the scattering mechanism extraction of dual-polarization SARs. A modified Cloude-Pottier decomposition is proposed to investigate the performance of the scattering mechanism extraction of dual-polarization SARs. It is theoretically demonstrated that only HH-VV SAR can discriminate the three canonical scattering mechanisms from an isotropic surface, horizontal dipole, and isotropic dihedral. Various experiments are conducted using 21 scenes from real datasets acquired by AIRSAR, Convair-580 SAR, EMISAR, E-SAR, Pi-SAR, and RADARSAT-2. Division of the dual-polarization H-α plane is experimentally obtained. The lack of cross-polarization induces the diffusion of scattering mechanisms and their overlap in the HH-VV H-α plane. However, the performance of HH-VV SAR for extracting scattering mechanisms is acceptable. Thus, HH-VV SAR is a suitable alternative to full-polarization SAR in certain cases. Meanwhile, the extraction performance of the other two dual-polarization SARs is badly degraded due to the lack of co-polarization. Therefore, HH-HV and HV-VV SARs cannot effectively extract the scattering mechanisms in the H-α plane.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.