General Two-Stage Model-Based Three-Component Hybrid Compact Polarimetric SAR Decomposition Method

Abstract

Polarimetric decomposition is an effective way for SAR data interpretation. As for Hybrid Compact Polarimetric (HCP) SAR, there are mainly two different types of decomposition methods including wave-dichotomy-theorem-based (WDTbased) and model-based. However, the existing methods are not universal because they can not estimate volume scattering component accurately in different scenes. In order to solve this problem, a general two-stage model-based three-component HCP decomposition method (GTM) is proposed by involving Arii volume scattering model. In the first stage, a method is designed to identify the dominant scattering mechanism (surface, dihedral, and volume scattering mechanism) of each pixel according to the characteristics of the three scattering models. Then, the GTM method is solved when the three basic scattering mechanisms are dominant respectively in the second stage. Two simulated HCP data sets are used to verify the performance of the decomposition method. The results show that GTM can more accurately identify the dominant scattering mechanism in different regions than existing methods, and it can obtain closer results to the quadpolarimetric method.

Polarimetric Decomposition With an Urban Area Descriptor for Compact Polarimetric SAR Data

“…Three methods are chosen for comparison, Wang's method [20], the three-component scattering model (HTM) [19], and the general two-stage model-based decomposition method (GTM) [17]. These methods are only applicable to CTLR mode.…”

“…Kumar et al [16] improved the − Ω method by utilizing the degree of dominance in the scattering mechanism via the circular polarization ratio (CPR). Hou et al [17] proposed a general two-stage model-based three-component HCP decomposition method by involving Arii volume scattering model to obtain closer results to the FP method.…”