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In this paper, we propose a processing chain jointly employing Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data, aiming to monitor changes in the status of the vegetation cover by integrating the four 10 m visible and near-infrared (VNIR) bands with the three red-edge (RE) bands of Sentinel-2. The latter approximately span the gap between red and NIR bands (700 nm–800 nm), with bandwidths of 15/20 nm and 20 m pixel spacing. The RE bands are sharpened to 10 m, following the hyper-sharpening protocol, which holds, unlike pansharpening, when the sharpening band is not unique. The resulting 10 m fusion product may be integrated with polarimetric features calculated from the Interferometric Wide (IW) Ground Range Detected (GRD) product of Sentinel-1, available at 10 m pixel spacing, before the fused data are analyzed for change detection. A key point of the proposed scheme is that the fusion of optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is accomplished at level of change, through modulation of the optical change feature, namely the difference in normalized area over (reflectance) curve (NAOC), calculated from the sharpened RE bands, by the polarimetric SAR change feature, achieved as the temporal ratio of polarimetric features, where the latter is the pixel ratio between the co-polar and the cross-polar channels. Hyper-sharpening of Sentinel-2 RE bands, calculation of NAOC and modulation-based integration of Sentinel-1 polarimetric change features are applied to multitemporal datasets acquired before and after a fire event, over Mount Serra, in Italy. The optical change feature captures variations in the content of chlorophyll. The polarimetric SAR temporal change feature describes depolarization effects and changes in volumetric scattering of canopies. Their fusion shows an increased ability to highlight changes in vegetation status. In a performance comparison achieved by means of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, the proposed change feature-based fusion approach surpasses a traditional area-based approach and the normalized burned ratio (NBR) index, which is widespread in the detection of burnt vegetation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a processing chain jointly employing Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data, aiming to monitor changes in the status of the vegetation cover by integrating the four 10 m visible and near-infrared (VNIR) bands with the three red-edge (RE) bands of Sentinel-2. The latter approximately span the gap between red and NIR bands (700 nm–800 nm), with bandwidths of 15/20 nm and 20 m pixel spacing. The RE bands are sharpened to 10 m, following the hyper-sharpening protocol, which holds, unlike pansharpening, when the sharpening band is not unique. The resulting 10 m fusion product may be integrated with polarimetric features calculated from the Interferometric Wide (IW) Ground Range Detected (GRD) product of Sentinel-1, available at 10 m pixel spacing, before the fused data are analyzed for change detection. A key point of the proposed scheme is that the fusion of optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is accomplished at level of change, through modulation of the optical change feature, namely the difference in normalized area over (reflectance) curve (NAOC), calculated from the sharpened RE bands, by the polarimetric SAR change feature, achieved as the temporal ratio of polarimetric features, where the latter is the pixel ratio between the co-polar and the cross-polar channels. Hyper-sharpening of Sentinel-2 RE bands, calculation of NAOC and modulation-based integration of Sentinel-1 polarimetric change features are applied to multitemporal datasets acquired before and after a fire event, over Mount Serra, in Italy. The optical change feature captures variations in the content of chlorophyll. The polarimetric SAR temporal change feature describes depolarization effects and changes in volumetric scattering of canopies. Their fusion shows an increased ability to highlight changes in vegetation status. In a performance comparison achieved by means of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, the proposed change feature-based fusion approach surpasses a traditional area-based approach and the normalized burned ratio (NBR) index, which is widespread in the detection of burnt vegetation.

Ship detection using polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Polarimetry can provide information regarding the scattering mechanisms of targets, which helps discriminate between ships and sea clutter. This enhancement is particularly valuable when we aim at detecting smaller vessels in rough sea states. This work exploits a ship detector called the Geometrical Perturbation-Polarimetric Notch Filter (GP-PNF), and it is aimed at improving its performance especially when less polarimetric images are available (e.g., dual-polarimetric data). The idea is to design a new polarimetric feature vector containing more features that are renowned to allow separation between ships and sea clutter. Then, a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is further used to reduce the dimensionality of the new feature space. Experiments on four real Sentinel-1 datasets are carried out to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method and compare it against other ship detectors. Analyses of the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can not only reduce the false alarms significantly, but also enhance the target-to-clutter ratio (TCR) so that it can more effectively detect weaker ships.

Ship detection using polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Polarimetry can provide information regarding the scattering mechanisms of targets, which helps discriminate between ships and sea clutter. This enhancement is particularly valuable when we aim at detecting smaller vessels in rough sea states. This work exploits a ship detector called the Geometrical Perturbation-Polarimetric Notch Filter (GP-PNF), and it is aimed at improving its performance especially when less polarimetric images are available (e.g., dual-polarimetric data). The idea is to design a new polarimetric feature vector containing more features that are renowned to allow separation between ships and sea clutter. Then, a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is further used to reduce the dimensionality of the new feature space. Experiments on four real Sentinel-1 datasets are carried out to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method and compare it against other ship detectors. Analyses of the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can not only reduce the false alarms significantly, but also enhance the target-to-clutter ratio (TCR) so that it can more effectively detect weaker ships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]