Polarimetric Coherence Optimization and Its Application for Manmade Target Extraction in PolSAR Data

Shun-Ping XIAO  Si-Wei CHEN  Yu-Liang CHANG  Yong-Zhen LI  Motoyuki SATO  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E97-C    No.6    pp.566-574
Publication Date: 2014/06/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1353
DOI: 10.1587/transele.E97.C.566
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Electromagnetic Theory
Keyword: 
synthetic aperture radar (SAR),  polarimetry,  coherency matrix,  covariance matrix,  rotation,  coherence optimization,  correlation coefficient,  manmade target,  

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Summary: 
Polarimetric coherence strongly relates to the types and orientations of local scatterers. An optimization scheme is proposed to optimize the coherence between two polarimetric channels for polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) data. The coherence magnitude (correlation coefficient) is maximized by rotating a polarimetric coherence matrix in the rotation domain around the radar line of sight. L-band E-SAR and X-band Pi-SAR PolSAR data sets are used for demonstration and validation. The coherence of oriented manmade targets is significantly enhanced while that of forests remains relatively low. Therefore, the proposed technique can effectively discriminate these two land covers which are easily misinterpreted by the conventional model-based decomposition. Moreover, based on an optimized polarimetric coherence parameter and the total backscattered power, a simple manmade target extraction scheme is developed for application demonstration. This approach is applied with the Pi-SAR data. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.