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In recent years, the integration of polarimetric imaging into robotic perception systems has increased significantly, driven by the accessibility of affordable polarimetric sensors. This technology complements traditional color imaging by capturing and analyzing the polarization characteristics of light. This additional information provides robots with valuable insights into object shape, material composition, and other properties, ultimately enabling more robust manipulation tasks. This review aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the principles behind polarimetric imaging and its diverse applications within the field of robotic perception. By exploiting the polarization state of light, polarimetric imaging offers promising solutions to three key challenges in robot vision: Surface segmentation; depth estimation through polarization patterns; and 3D reconstruction using polarimetric data. This review emphasizes the practical value of polarimetric imaging in robotics by demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing real-world challenges. We then explore potential applications of this technology not only within the core robotics field but also in related areas. Through a comparative analysis, our goal is to elucidate the strengths and limitations of polarimetric imaging techniques. This analysis will contribute to a deeper understanding of its broad applicability across various domains within and beyond robotics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images with multiple polarimetric channels have high discrimination ability. So, they are appropriate data for classification applications. The suitable use of both scattering (polarimetric) and spatial features in a PolSAR image is important to provide an accurate classification map. Many basic classifiers such as support vector machine (SVM) only works based on feature vectors and ignore the spatial features. To convert a basic classifier such as SVM to a powerful classifier for PolSAR image classification, the polarimetric and spatial base iterative (PSI) classifier is proposed in this work. The PSI method tries to refine the labels of an initial classification map obtained by a simple classifier (SVM in this work). To this end, three terms of similarity based on spatial, polarimetric and class-specific features are computed in neighborhood regions. According to the computed similarity values, the new labels are generated and the scattering features of the PolSAR images are refined. This simple process is repeated several times to a pre-determined number of iterations. The result is a clean and accurate classification map. The experiments are done on two AIRSAR PolSAR images. Compared to the base classifier (SVM), the proposed method provides about 10% and 6% increase in classification accuracy of Flevoland and Sanfrancisco datasets with 19 and 50 iterations, respectively. Moreover, the proposed PSI method shows desirable performance compared to several complex and powerful classification methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Snow depth on sea ice is an Essential Climate Variable and a major source of uncertainty in satellite altimetry‐derived sea ice thickness. During winter of the MOSAiC Expedition, the "KuKa" dual‐frequency, fully polarized Ku‐ and Ka‐band radar was deployed in "stare" nadir‐looking mode to investigate the possibility of combining these two frequencies to retrieve snow depth. Three approaches were investigated: dual‐frequency, dual‐polarization and waveform shape, and compared to independent snow depth measurements. Novel dual‐polarization approaches yielded r2 values up to 0.77. Mean snow depths agreed within 1 cm, even for data sub‐banded to CryoSat‐2 SIRAL and SARAL AltiKa bandwidths. Snow depths from co‐polarized dual‐frequency approaches were at least a factor of four too small and had a r2 0.15 or lower. r2 for waveform shape techniques reached 0.72 but depths were underestimated. Snow depth retrievals using polarimetric information or waveform shape may therefore be possible from airborne/satellite radar altimeters. Plain Language Summary: Data collected using a surface‐based radar instrument on sea ice during the MOSAiC Arctic expedition were used to develop new techniques to estimate the depth of the overlying snow. We used different polarizations of the radiation to detect the depths of the upper and lower snow surfaces, and subtracted them to give snow depth. These depths agreed well with an independently collected snow depth data set. Estimates of snow depth using two different radar frequencies were less accurate, whilst using information of the shape of the returning pulse of radiation also showed a relationship with the independent snow depths, though not as strong as the polarization method. These results indicate that polarimetry (using a new satellite mission) and/or waveform shape (using existing missions) could be used to estimate snow depth on sea ice from airborne or satellite platforms. Key Points: Novel polarization‐based snow depth estimation techniques were developed using surface‐based Ku‐ and Ka‐band polarimetric radar altimeter dataThe dominant scattering surface was the air/snow and snow/ice interface in co‐ and cross‐polarized data, respectively, at both frequenciesRadar‐derived snow depths agreed with independent measurements, with r2 up to 0.77 and accuracy of 1 cm for best‐performing techniques [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared with the optical imaging system, polarimetric inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) can work all-day and all-weather, which plays an important role in space surveillance. However, high-resolution (HR) ISAR images usually require large bandwidth and coherent integration angle, which is limited by the equipment’s physical conditions. In this vein, the super-resolution (SR) of ISAR images is of vital importance. At present, supervised learning methods are often used in image SR of computer vision. By constructing low-resolution (LR) and HR data pairs, the neural network can learn the mapping relationship between them. However, the low-frequency information in LR image data is less considered. In addition, to obtain different scales of SR reconstruction results, multiple network training repetitions are usually needed, which consumes time and hardware resources. Based on the idea of implicit neural representation, this letter constructs an implicit neural network representation framework for polarimetric ISAR image SR, which can obtain multiscale SR results through one training. A semi-supervised module is also constructed to make the network have the ability of supervised and unsupervised learning, which is conducive to mine and make better use of LR images. A polarimetric ISAR image SR dataset is constructed for satellite targets, while four indexes are adopted for quantitative evaluation in global and local aspects. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves better SR performance, where the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) index can be increased at least by 0.93 dB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Producing high-resolution urban land cover maps is essential for decision-making and urban management. In this regard, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), especially Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR), has served as a valuable data source to fulfill this task. Direct conversion of low-level features into high-level Land Cover (LC) concept may reduce the final classification accuracy. Therefore, mid-level representation models, such as Bag of Visual Words (BOVW), were employed to resolve the existing semantic gap challenge. In this paper, a Segment-based BOVW (Seg-BOVW) model was developed for urban land cover classification using PolSAR data. To this end, two PolSAR data over San Francisco Bay (SFB) and Flevoland (FL) acquired by RADARSAT-2 were employed to comprehensively evaluate the Seg-BOVW model's performance. First, to exploit the full potential of PolSAR data, 169 low-level features in four categories: (1) original, (2) polarimetric, (3) texture, and (4) decomposition features were extracted. Afterward, a Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) was implemented to investigate the importance of low-level features for urban land cover mapping. This step resulted in selecting 14 and 6 low-level features, as the high contributing features, for SFB and FL datasets, respectively. The Seg-BOVW model achieved significant overall accuracies of 96.02% and 98.82% for SFB and FL, respectively, indicating the high potential of the proposed method for urban land cover classification. Furthermore, a comparison with other well-known algorithms of Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) was made, suggesting the capability of the Seg-BOVW model to improve the urban land cover classification results. Finally, the Seg-BOVW model was tested with two other PolSAR datasets acquired with different sensors over SFB to examine its applicability with different datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a design methodology and prototyping of an angular speed sensor based on microwave polarimetry. The detection mechanism relies on the transmission response of a dual-polarized circular aperture irradiating an array of regularly spaced copper traces printed on a PCB. The generated response is a regular pulse train defined by the location of the copper trace with reference to the center of the circular aperture. While the angular speed sensor can be sampled at any rate and for any time length, the detector response was acquired within a 1-s duration with the circular aperture response effectively sampled at 10 kHz for demonstration purposes. The acquired response was analyzed in the frequency domain using the fast Fourier transform (FFT) and the rotor speed was obtained from the frequency spectrum of the acquired pulse train. To demonstrate the working principle of the detection system, the printed PCB rotor, which occupies an area of 84.64 cm2, was attached to a rotary stage set to rotate at certain angular speeds, including but not limited to 62 r/min. In all the speed settings, the speeds were detected in 1 s with a worst case error of ±0.625 r/min. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Tropical cyclones (TCs) can transport birds and insects near their center of circulation. In this study, we examined the maximum altitude, area and density of the radar‐derived bioscatter signature across a set of 42 TC centers of circulation sampled from 2011 to 2020. All TC events contained at least one time when a bioscatter signature was present. More intense hurricanes with closed eyes typically had taller and denser bioscatter signatures, and sometimes larger areas dominated by bioscatter. This indicated a larger number of organisms within the circulation of more intense hurricanes, supporting the speculation that those storms were most likely to trap birds that do not want to risk flying through their eyewall thunderstorms. Larger and denser bioscatter signatures, indicating a larger number of birds, tend to occur when fall migration brings a large bird population to the Gulf and East Coasts where most storms were sampled. TC formation location was not related to bioscatter characteristics, but storms sampled in the Gulf of Mexico and Florida tended to have larger and denser bioscatter signatures.

This work presents the first RFI detection and mitigation algorithm for the interferometric radiometers that will be implemented in its correlator unit. The algorithm operates in the time and frequency domains, applying polarimetric and statistical tests in both domains, and exhibiting a tunable and arbitrary low probability of false alarm. It is scalable to a configurable number of receivers, and it is optimized in terms of quantization bits and the implementation of the cross-correlations in the time or frequency domains for hardware resource saving. New features of this algorithm are the computation of the Stokes parameters per frequency bin in the Short-Time Fourier Transform and a new parameter called Polarimetric Kurtosis. If RFI is detected in one domain or in both, it is removed using the calculated blanking masks. The optimum algorithm parameters are computed, such as length of the FFTs, the threshold selection for a given probability of false alarm, and the selection of the blanking masks. Last, an important result refers to the application of Parseval's theorem for the computation of the cross-correlations in the frequency domain, instead of in the time domain, which is more efficient and leads to smaller errors even when using moderate quantization levels. The algorithm has been developed in the framework of the ESA's technology preparation for a potential L-band radiometer mission beyond SMOS. However, it is also applicable to (polarimetric) real aperture radiometers, and its performance would improve if more than one bit is used in the signal quantization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forest biomass plays an essential role in forest carbon reservoir studies, biodiversity protection, forest management, and climate change mitigation actions. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), especially the polarimetric SAR with the capability of identifying different aspects of forest structure, shows great potential in the accurate estimation of total and component forest above-ground biomass (AGB), including stem, bark, branch, and leaf biomass. This study aims to fully explore the potential of polarimetric parameters at the C- and L-bands to achieve high estimation accuracy and improve the estimation of AGB saturation levels. In this study, the backscattering coefficients at different polarimetric channels and polarimetric parameters extracted from Freeman2, Yamaguchi3, H-A-Alpha, and Target Scattering Vector Model (TSVM) decomposition methods were optimized by a random forest algorithm, first, and then inputted into linear regression models to estimate the total forest AGB and biomass components of two test sites in China. The results showed that polarimetric observations had great potential in total and component AGB estimation in the two test sites; the best performances were for leaves at test site I, with R2 = 0.637 and RMSE = 1.27 t/hm2. The estimation of biomass components at both test sites showed obvious saturation phenomenon estimation according to their scatter plots. The results obtained at both test sites demonstrated the potential of polarimetric parameters in total and component biomass estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tropical cyclones (TCs) can transport birds and insects near their center of circulation. In this study, we examined the maximum altitude, area and density of the radar‐derived bioscatter signature across a set of 42 TC centers of circulation sampled from 2011 to 2020. All TC events contained at least one time when a bioscatter signature was present. More intense hurricanes with closed eyes typically had taller and denser bioscatter signatures, and sometimes larger areas dominated by bioscatter. This indicated a larger number of organisms within the circulation of more intense hurricanes, supporting the speculation that those storms were most likely to trap birds that do not want to risk flying through their eyewall thunderstorms. Larger and denser bioscatter signatures, indicating a larger number of birds, tend to occur when fall migration brings a large bird population to the Gulf and East Coasts where most storms were sampled. TC formation location was not related to bioscatter characteristics, but storms sampled in the Gulf of Mexico and Florida tended to have larger and denser bioscatter signatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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An object-based approach is proposed for land cover classification using optimal polarimetric parameters. The ability to identify targets is effectively enhanced by the integration of SAR and optical images. The innovation of the presented method can be summarized in the following two main points: ①estimating polarimetric parameters (H-A-Alpha decomposition) through the optical image as a driver; ②a multi-resolution segmentation based on the optical image only is deployed to refine classification results. The proposed method is verified by using Sentinel-1/2 datasets over the Bakersfield area, California. The results are compared against those from pixel-based SVM classification using the ground truth from the National Land Cover Database (NLCD). A detailed accuracy assessment complied with seven classes shows that the proposed method outperforms the conventional approach by around 10%, with an overall accuracy of 92.6% over regions with rich texture.

The measurement of insect radar cross section (RCS) is a prerequisite for the studies such as the quantitative estimation of insect population density and the identification of insects using entomological radar. In this article, we established a multiband polarimetric RCS measurement system in the microwave anechoic chamber. The targets’ range profile at different frequencies can be obtained based on the step frequency continuous wave, and meanwhile the clutter elimination and polarimetric calibration were applied to reduce the measuring error. The multifrequency (X-/Ku-/Ka-bands) polarimetric RCSs of 169 insects belonging to 21 species were measured and reported, which is the first time to systematically present the multifrequency polarimetric RCSs of insects. The mass of all specimens range from 25.6 to 964 mg, and their ventral-aspect RCSs range from −57.47 to −32.17 dBsm at X-band, from −48.27 to −33.87 dBsm at Ku-band and from −69.76 to −36.40 dBsm at Ka-band. For small insects less than 300 mg, the HH polarization RCS increases rapidly with frequency at X-band and fluctuates with the frequency at Ku-band, while the VV polarization RCS increases monotonically with frequency at X- and Ku-band. For larger insects, the HH polarization RCS decreased slowly with frequency at X-band and fluctuates with the frequency at Ku-band, while the VV polarization RCS increases with the frequency, then reaches the maximum, finally fluctuates with the frequency. At Ka-band, the measured polarization RCS versus frequency curves are smooth and all show similar variation. The measurement results verify the effectiveness and accuracy of the established system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Irrigated rice requires intense water management under typical agronomic practices. Cost effective tools to improve the efficiency and assessment of water use is a key need for industry and resource managers to scale ecosystem services. In this research we advance model‐based decomposition and machine learning to map inundated rice using time‐series polarimetric, L‐band Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) observations. Simultaneous ground truth observations recorded water depth inundation during the 2019 crop season using instrumented fields across the study site in Arkansas, USA. A three‐component model‐based decomposition generated metrics representing surface‐, double bounce‐, and volume‐scattering along with a shape factor, randomness factor, and the Radar Vegetation Index (RVI). These physically meaningful metrics characterized crop inundation status independent of growth stage including under dense canopy cover. Machine learning (ML) comparisons employed Random Forest (RF) using the UAVSAR derived parameters to identify cropland inundation status across the region. Outcomes show that RVI, proportion of the double‐bounce within total scattering, and the relative comparison between the double‐bounce and the volume scattering have moderate to strong mechanistic ability to identify rice inundation status with Overall Accuracy (OA) achieving 75%. The use of relative ratios further helped mitigate the impacts of far range incidence angles. The RF approach, which requires training data, achieved a higher OA and Kappa of 88% and 71%, respectively, when leveraging multiple SAR parameters. Thus, the combination of physical characterization and ML provides a powerful approach to retrieving cropland inundation under the canopy. The growth of polarimetric L‐band availability should enhance cropland inundation metrics beyond open water that are required for tracking water quantity at field scale over large areas.

Irrigated rice requires intense water management under typical agronomic practices. Cost effective tools to improve the efficiency and assessment of water use is a key need for industry and resource managers to scale ecosystem services. In this research we advance model‐based decomposition and machine learning to map inundated rice using time‐series polarimetric, L‐band Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) observations. Simultaneous ground truth observations recorded water depth inundation during the 2019 crop season using instrumented fields across the study site in Arkansas, USA. A three‐component model‐based decomposition generated metrics representing surface‐, double bounce‐, and volume‐scattering along with a shape factor, randomness factor, and the Radar Vegetation Index (RVI). These physically meaningful metrics characterized crop inundation status independent of growth stage including under dense canopy cover. Machine learning (ML) comparisons employed Random Forest (RF) using the UAVSAR derived parameters to identify cropland inundation status across the region. Outcomes show that RVI, proportion of the double‐bounce within total scattering, and the relative comparison between the double‐bounce and the volume scattering have moderate to strong mechanistic ability to identify rice inundation status with Overall Accuracy (OA) achieving 75%. The use of relative ratios further helped mitigate the impacts of far range incidence angles. The RF approach, which requires training data, achieved a higher OA and Kappa of 88% and 71%, respectively, when leveraging multiple SAR parameters. Thus, the combination of physical characterization and ML provides a powerful approach to retrieving cropland inundation under the canopy. The growth of polarimetric L‐band availability should enhance cropland inundation metrics beyond open water that are required for tracking water quantity at field scale over large areas. Key Points: Cropland inundation assessment has largely focused on open waterQuad polarized L‐band SAR can help detect under canopy inundationThe underlying physical mechanisms driving scattering responses and machine learning algorithms had similar outcomes [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new method for separating convective, intermediate, and stratiform rainfall based on the wavelet scale analysis is presented. A robust classification has resulted from the two choices: 1) the transformation of radar reflectivities to rain rates and 2) the inclusion of the intermediate class. The method uses á trous wavelet transform (WT) to separate heterogeneous convective features from the relatively smooth stratiform field. The heterogeneous region is further split into a convective class for the large wavelet coefficients and an intermediate class for the small wavelet coefficients. There is an improvement in the estimation of convective-stratiform fraction and frequency distribution of rain rates in comparison to the well-established Steiner method. The new method correctly reclassified a significant fraction of Steiner’s convective regions, which had low mean rain rates of 5.5 $\mathrm {mm}\cdot \mathrm {h}^{-1}$ , as stratiform regions. Similarly, Steiner’s stratiform regions, which had high mean rain rates of $15\,\,\mathrm {mm}\cdot \mathrm {h}^{-1}$ , are classified as convective by the wavelet method. The method is tested and evaluated over the Indian region during monsoon, and it is found that the three wavelet classes have distinct raindrop-size distributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection of the radio signal from filaments in the cosmic web is crucial to distinguish possible magnetogenesis scenarios. We review the status of the different attempts to detect the cosmic web at radio wavelengths. This is put into the context of the advanced simulations of cosmic magnetism carried out in the last few years by our MAGCOW project. While first attempts of imaging the cosmic web with the MWA and LOFAR have been encouraging and could discard some magnetogenesis models, the complexity behind such observations makes a definitive answer still uncertain. A combination of total intensity and polarimetric data at low radio frequencies that the SKA and LOFAR2.0 will achieve is key to removing the existing uncertainties related to the contribution of many possible sources of signal along deep lines of sight. This will make it possible to isolate the contribution from filaments, and expose its deep physical connection with the origin of extragalactic magnetism.

This article proposes an unsupervised multiregion segmentation method for fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (polSAR) images based on the improved fuzzy active contour model. Different from most of the active contour models that are based on the utilization of only statistical information, the proposed method makes better use of information from polarimetric data. In addition to the statistical information, an edge detector modified from the ratio of exponentially weighted averages (ROEWA) operator, a sliding window algorithm for the total received power, and a ratio operator with respect to scattering mechanisms are integrated to the proposed active contour model. We then present a layer-based fuzzy active contour framework to solve our model. The general fuzzy active contour framework is computationally much more efficient compared with the level set-based framework; however, it cannot be applied to the multiregion segmentation of SAR images due to its low robustness to strong noise. The proposed approach includes the advantages of the general fuzzy active contour framework and has good robustness. Using two fully polSAR images demonstrates that the proposed method can achieve higher efficiency and a better segmentation performance in comparison with the commonly used active contour methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimating forest attributes is essential for understanding the condition and function of the forest to be applied in forest planning and management. The purpose of this study was to estimate the structural attributes of conifer-dominated plantations using radio detection and ranging (RADAR) polarimetric data and nonparametric algorithms in the Arabdagh region of Golestan province. Field-based structural attributes were collected from 319 circular plots with 400 m2 areas designed within a random cluster method. Within each plot, diameter at breast height (for all trees) and height (for some trees) were measured. The precise position of plots ere also recorded. Then stand volume, basal area, and the number of stem per ha were calculated. The required preprocessing and processing were conducted on raw RADAR data, followed by the extraction of plot-based values from the derived indices. Model training was done on 75% of plots using random forest, support vector machine, and K nearest neighbor algorithms. Results were validated with the remaining 25% of the plots. The results showed the lowest Root Mean Square Error and Bias for Random Forest algorithm for basal area 50.62% and -1.7%, respectively. Moreover, the support vector machine model achieved 58.82% and -7.94% for volume as well as 52.07% and -5.1% for no. of trees per hectare. As a whole, this study showed that the full polarization PALSAR-2 data has a moderate ability to estimate the quantitative structural attributes due to the high amplitude of changes in the quantitative forest characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This letter presents two main contributions to the data quality assessment of China’s new GaoFen-3 radar satellite. First, we observed a half-pixel misregistration between the horizontal (H) and vertical (V) transmitting channels in the azimuth direction. This was determined by investigating the corner reflector (CR) response of some stripmap products of GaoFen-3 quad-pol stripmap (QPSI) mode. Second, to check whether the azimuth misregistration exists in different beams of QPSI mode, we improved the RADARSAT-2 channel checking method as a tool and evaluated more than 300 stripmap scenes. This letter confirms that the half-pixel misregistration problem, which can cause about 10% decoherence in the co-pol and cross-pol channel correlation coefficients, is common in the GaoFen-3 stripmap products of QPSI mode. Furthermore, the improved method can be considered as an effective way to fix the misregistration problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional distributed-target-based polarimetric calibration algorithms estimate polarimetric distortions by assuming that the measured spatially averaged covariance matrix takes a specific form. However, when the underlying surface contains targets that do not satisfy the assumptions employed by those algorithms, the averaged covariance matrix may deviate from the desired form. As a result, poor estimates of distortion parameters may yield. It is known that spherically truncated covariance matrix is robust to outliers. Thus, we introduce it to the polarimetric SAR calibration routine. Experiment results on the airborne SAR data confirm that this method can effectively reduce the uncertainty of distortion estimates, hence improve the robustness of the calibration.

Soil salinization is a global problem, which seriously damages the ecological environment and considerably reduces agricultural productivity, especially in arid regions. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been widely used in remote sensing due to its weather and sunlight independence. Polarimetric SAR has great potential for large-scale mapping and monitoring salt-affected soils. In this study, we investigate the characteristics of saline soil in extremely arid regions using dual-band quadrature-polarimetric (quad-pol) SAR images acquired by GF-3 (C-band) and ALOS-2 (L-band). Firstly, the effectiveness of the modified dielectric mixing model and integral equation model (IEM) in describing saline soil is evaluated. Secondly, the potential relationships between polarimetric parameters and salinity are discussed in both the C- and L-band, respectively, such as co-polarization ratio, scattering entropy H, and scattering angle α. Finally, a linear regression model for monitoring salt content is established. The main contributions of this article are as follows: (1) Simulation results suggest that the radar backscattering coefficient is a weak function of salinity at low water content, but our experimental data show that soil salinity significantly contributes to the radar backscattering coefficient, which indicates the modified dielectric mixing model and IEM model is not applicable in extremely arid areas. (2) A negative correlation between the co-polarization ratio and salinity is observed, and the correlation coefficients are 0.64 (C-band) and 0.71 (L-band). Besides, scattering entropy and scattering angle exhibit a positive correlation with salinity in the C-band with correlation coefficients 0.686 and 0.669, respectively, whereas a negative correlation is found in the L-band with correlation coefficients 0.682 and 0.680, respectively. This can be attributed to the different penetration depths and sensitivity to the surface roughness of the electromagnetic waves at two frequencies. (3) A regression model for salinity estimating based on radar backscattering coefficient, co-polarization ratio, and scattering entropy is established, with a determination coefficient (R2) of 0.79 and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 6.56%, allowing us to determine soil salinity from quad-pol SAR images without using backscattering models. Therefore, our results can be a reference for future soil salinity monitoring and inversion.

SCoBi-Veg stands for Signals of opportunity Coherent Bistatic scattering model for Vegetated terrains. It simulates polarimetric reflectometry of vegetation canopy over a flat ground using a Monte Carlo scheme. The model is aimed at assessing the value of navigation and communication satellite Signals of Opportunity in a range of frequencies from P- to S-bands for remote sensing of a number of geophysical land parameters such as soil moisture and biomass. A fully polarimetric expression for bistatic scattering from a vegetation canopy is first formulated for a general case and is then specialized to the practical case of ground-based/low-altitude platforms with passive receivers overlooking vegetation using the signals transmitted from large distances. Using analytical wave theory in conjunction with distorted Born approximation, the transmit and receive antenna effects (i.e., polarization crosstalk/mismatch, orientation, and altitude) are explicitly accounted for. The forward model developed here enables the understanding of the effect of different geophysical parameters and system configurations on the coherent and incoherent components of the reflected signatures. It can thus help developing robust inverse algorithm for extraction of soil moisture and biomass. The model is applied to P-band signals of geostationary communication satellites to describe polarimetric reflections from tree canopies as observed from down-looking platforms at various altitudes. The relative contributions of diffuse and specular scattering on total reflected power and reflectivity are quantified for various observing scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • The use of a polarization ring protects the most vulnerable part of a sensor head. • We break the sensitivity-range limit by introducing an angular lag. • The sensor has high torsion sensitivity and low temperature cross-talk. Abstract A novel torsion sensor is proposed based on the polarization characteristics of a pair of angularly cascaded long period fiber gratings (ALPFG). A set of special designed fiber rings serve as the detached sensor head and the ALPFG provides the polarization filter. The input polarization is continually adjustable through rotating the dial of the fiber rings, which alters the output intensity from ALPFG, and the torsion sensitivity can reach −15.355 dB/rad. We study the periodicity of output intensity theoretically and experimentally and find the angular lag between the fluctuations of the two resonant dips. Through post-proceeding, we break the sensitivity-range limit and double the measuring range by taking advantage of the angular lag. This system design not only theoretically provides a more sensitive sensor head design, but also possesses more flexible, healthy and temperature-insensitive characteristics. Therefore, such sensor can be a good candidate for torsion sensing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A method of polarimetric robust adaptive target detection in Gaussian clutter and noise was presented. There potentially exist many reasons, such as imperfectly calibrated arrays, pointing errors, etc., which may lead to the detection loss due to the mismatch between the presumed target steering vector and the actual one. A subspace based robust detector against model imperfection was proposed by adding some steering vectors close to the presumed one in the subspace constraint. Simulation results show that the proposed method performs well in the case of large target steering vector error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a two-level block matching pursuit (TLBMP) algorithm based on a probabilistic graph model for polarimetric through-wall radar imaging (TWRI). In typical L-band to X-band TWRI, indoor targets assume a spatial extent and occupy clustered pixels. When polarimetric sensing is used to obtain independent observations, radar images of clustered targets can be enhanced within the joint sparsity framework. Toward this objective, TLBMP is devised to exploit both the clustered property and the joint sparsity pattern of multiple polarimetric through-wall radar images. Simulations and experimental results based on polarimetric through-wall radar data demonstrate that compared to commonly used algorithms for solving the same underlying problem, TLBMP provides more informative imaging with higher target-to-clutter ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The optimal source-finding strategy for linear polarization data is an unsolved problem, with many inhibitive factors imposed by the technically challenging nature of polarization observations. Such an algorithm is essential for Square Kilometre Array (SKA) pathfinder surveys, such as the Multifrequency Snapshot Sky Survey with the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR), as data volumes are significant enough to prohibit manual inspection. We present a new strategy of 'Faraday Moments' for source-finding in linear polarization with LOFAR, using the moments of the frequency-dependent full-Stokes data (i.e. the mean, standard deviation, skewness, and excess kurtosis). Through simulations of the sky, we find that moments can identify polarized sources with a high completeness: 98.5 per cent at a signal to noise of 5. While the method has low reliability, rotation measure (RM) synthesis can be applied per candidate source to filter out instrumental and spurious detections. This combined strategy will result in a complete and reliable catalogue of polarized sources that includes the full sensitivity of the observational bandwidth. We find that the technique can reduce the number of pixels on which RM Synthesis needs to be performed by a factor of ≈1 × 105 for source distributions anticipated with modern radio telescopes. Through tests on LOFAR data, we find that the technique works effectively in the presence of diffuse emission. Extensions of this method are directly applicable to other upcoming radio surveys such as the POlarization Sky Survey of the Universe's Magnetism with the Australia Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, and the SKA itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The article discusses the ability of polarimetric multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar to operate data in joint spatial and polarization domains. • The article explores the non-ideal factors that may exist in practical polarimetric MIMO radar and points out that many existing methods cannot handle these factors. • The article proposes a joint direction-of-arrival (DOA) and polarization parameter estimation method, termed PMS2, which incorporates the polarimetric manifold separation (PMS) technique and requires no pair matching or spectral peak searching procedures. The proposed PMS2 approach can perform joint DOA and polarization estimation for polarimetric MIMO radar with various non-ideal factors for an array, such as gain error, phase error, and position error. • The article provides the Cramér-Rao lower bound for the multi-dimensional parameters involved in the estimation problem. • The article presents simulation results that demonstrate the performance advantages of the proposed PMS2 approach, which is attributed to the compact structure of polarimetric transceivers and the ability of the PMS2 approach to handle the polarimetric properties of signals. Compared with conventional multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar, polarimetric MIMO radar has been proven to hold the additional capability to operate data in the joint spatial and polarization domains. However, practical transceivers may involve antenna arrays with classical non-ideal factors (e.g., gain/phase/position errors) and polarimetric non-ideal factors (e.g., polarimetric antenna misorientation), and many current approaches cannot handle such non-ideal factors in real applications. In this study, polynomial rooting-based direction-of-arrival (DOA) and polarization parameter estimation is investigated for polarimetric monostatic MIMO radar with non-ideal transceivers. By incorporating the polarimetric manifold separation (PMS) technique, a joint DOA and polarization parameter estimation method, termed PMS2, is proposed with a closed-form solution. The Cramér-Rao bound for the multi-dimensional parameters involved in the estimation problem is also given. Simulation results demonstrate the performance advantages of the proposed PMS2 approach, which is attributed to the compact structure of polarimetric transceivers and the ability of the PMS2 approach to handle the polarimetric properties of signals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fully-polarimetric unitary multiple signal classification (UMUSIC) tomography algorithm is proposed, which can be used for acquiring high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) imagery, in a polarimetric multiple-input multiple-output synthetic aperture radar (MIMO-SAR) with a small number of baselines. In terms of the elevation resolution, UMUSIC provides an improvement over standard MUSIC by utilizing the conjugate of the complex sample data and converting the complex covariance matrix into a real matrix. The combination of UMUSIC and fully-polarimetric data permits a further reduction of the noise of the sample covariance matrix, which is obtained through pixel averaging of multiple two-dimensional (2D) images. Considering the consistency of four polarizations, this algorithm not only makes scattering centers have the same estimated height in four polarizations, but it also improves the estimation accuracy. Simulation results show that this algorithm outperforms the popular distributed compressed sensing (DCS). Image processing of measured data of an aircraft model using a multiple-input multiple-output synthetic aperture radar (MIMO-SAR) with six baselines is presented to validate the proposed algorithm.

Polarization-selective uncooled infrared (IR) sensors are promising for IR polarimetric imaging with respect to enhancement of the object recognition ability. Polarization-selective absorbers that operate in the broadband wavelength region and have simply fabricated small structures are strongly required for high-performance IR polarimetric imaging. In the present study, plasmonic micrograting absorbers (PMGAs) were designed as broadband polarization-selective absorbers. The PMGAs have an Au-based one-dimensional periodic grating structure. Numerical calculations demonstrated that tapered-sidewalls with deep groove depths produce broadband polarization-selective absorption with wavelengths larger than the grating period. Microelectromechanical systems-based uncooled IR sensors with tapered-PMGAs were fabricated using complementary metal oxide semiconductor and micromachining techniques. Tapered-sidewalls were formed by isotropic etching using reactive ion etching equipment. The responsivity could be selectively enhanced according to the polarization angle, and an absorption wavelength longer than the surface period and broadband absorption were realized due to the effect of the tapered-sidewalls. The PMGAs enable detection wavelengths longer than the grating period and broadband polarization-selectivity by control of the taper angle and the grating depth. The results obtained in this study will contribute to the advancement of polarimetric IR imaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers are attempting to classify the fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar data utilizing diverse methods based on polarimetric indices, decomposition, and image analysis. Although, all these techniques have great potential, and able to segregate distinct land cover classes, but still there occurs ambiguity in classifying urban and tall vegetation classes as they both show similar kind of double-bounce scattering characteristics. In the past, Yamaguchi has modified the polarization process by applying the deorientation effect, which has enhanced the double-bounce characteristic of similar classes like urban and tall vegetation. Based on this, an attempt has been made in this letter to remove the uncertainty between the two classes by proposing a deorientation feature-based classification algorithm which could segregate urban and tall vegetation in an unsupervised way. In this, along with polarimetric, other features, namely, color, texture, and wavelets, have been critically analyzed on the deoriented image as each feature type has its own points of interest and hindrances. The result obtained from the proposed technique has shown good accuracy rate for urban and tall vegetation classification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this publication, we continue the work started in Quintero Noda et al., examining this time a numerical simulation of a magnetic flux tube concentration. Our goal is to study if the physical phenomena that take place in it, in particular, the magnetic pumping, leaves a specific imprint on the examined spectral lines. We find that the profiles from the interior of the flux tube are periodically doppler shifted following an oscillation pattern that is also reflected in the amplitude of the circular polarization signals. In addition, we analyse the properties of the Stokes profiles at the edges of the flux tube discovering the presence of linear polarization signals for the Ca II lines, although they are weak with an amplitude around 0.5 per cent of the continuum intensity. Finally, we compute the response functions to perturbations in the longitudinal field, and we estimate the field strength using the weak-field approximation. Our results indicate that the height of formation of the spectral lines changes during the magnetic pumping process, which makes the interpretation of the inferred magnetic field strength and its evolution more difficult. These results complement those from previous works, demonstrating the capabilities and limitations of the 850-nm spectrum for chromospheric Zeeman polarimetry in a very dynamic and complex atmosphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectropolarimetry is one of the most powerful methods to study the multi-dimensional geometry of supernovae (SNe). We present a brief summary of the spectropolarimetric observations of strippedenvelope core-collapse SNe. Observations indicate that stripped-envelope SNe generally have a nonaxisymmetric ion distribution in the ejecta. Threedimensional clumpy geometry nicely explains the observed properties. A typical size of the clumps deduced from observations is relatively large: ≥25% of the photosphere. Such a large-scale clumpy structure is similar to that observed in Cassiopeia A, and suggests that large-scale convection or standing accretion shock instability takes place at the onset of the explosion. This article is part of the themed issue 'Bridging the gap: from massive stars to supernovae'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Full polarimetric L-band PALSAR data facilitated one of the first empirical assessments of the relationships between radar polarization properties (RPPs) and ecological pattern properties (EPPs) in desert fringe ecosystems. Correlations between radar parameters (polarized backscattering intensities, their ratios, entropy, and degrees of polarization) and remotely sensed ecological parameters (shrub cover, edge parameter, average shrub height, and biomass information) were analyzed for 52 least-disturbed sites along a climatic gradient between semi-arid and arid zones in the south-eastern Mediterranean. The degree of horizontal polarization (DOHP) was the RPP that was most highly correlated with all EPPs, while NDVIR biomass (NDVI multiplied by relative rainfall) was the EPP most highly correlated with all RPPs. Combinations of NDVIR biomass and DOHP data exhibited consistent inverse relationships for both the 52 least-disturbed sites as well as for the entire gradient. Mapping these combinations along the transition zone enabled differentiation of desert fringe areas and dense shrub and tree areas, with three transition typologies between the two. Although DOHP is instrumental in detecting changes in tall shrub coverage, it was found to be insufficiently sensitive to surface conditions in areas with dwarf shrubs and shrubs of biomass lower than 0.7 kg/m 2 at the end of the summer. Differentiation between the desert, desert fringe, and semi-arid margins of high DOHP values (> 0.9) was facilitated by differences in their NDVIR biomass. Areas of high anthropogenic influence on the landscape, i.e. abandoned terraces and low-density pine plantations, deviate significantly from the inverse DOHP and NDVIR biomass relationship, as both were characterized by low values in these parameterizations. The wide extent of DOHP and NDVIR combinations representing desert fringe ecosystems and arid lands indicated a continuation of degradation processes in areas with rainfalls > 500 mm/year. The technique developed, which utilizes DOHP, provides new means for mapping desert fringe ecosystems and for exploring desertification over wide regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically analyzes several incoherent model-based decomposition methods for assessing the effect of deorientation in characterization of various land covers. It has been found that even after performing decomposition, ambiguity still occurs in scattering response from various land covers, such as urban and vegetation. Researchers introduced the concept of deorientation to remove this ambiguity. Therefore, in this paper, a critical analysis has been carried out using seven different three- and four-component decomposition methods with and without deorientation and two Eigen decomposition-based methods to investigate the scattering response on various land covers, such as urban, vegetation, bare soil, and water. The comprehensive evaluation of decomposition and deorientation effect has been performed by both visual and quantitative analyses. Two types of quantitative analysis have been performed; first, by observing percentage of scattering power and second, by analyzing the variation in the number of pixels in different land covers for each scattering contribution. The analysis shows that deorientation increases not only the power but also the number of pixels for surface and double bounce scattering. The number of pixels representing volume scattering remain almost the same for all the methods with or without deorientation, whereas volume scattering power reduces after deorientation. Eigen decomposition-based methods are observed to solve the problem of overestimation of volume scattering power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we propose a classification scheme for forest growth stage types and other cover types using a support vector machine (SVM) based on the Polarimetric SAR Interferometric (PolInSAR) data acquired by Chinese Multidimensional Space Joint-observation SAR (MSJosSAR) system. Firstly, polarimetric, texture, and coherence features were calculated from the PolInSAR data. Secondly, the capabilities of the polarimetric, texture, and coherence features in land use/cover classification were quantified independently through histograms. Following this, the polarimetric features were used for the classification of land use/cover types, followed by a combination of texture and coherence features. Finally, the three classification results were validated against test samples using the confusion matrix. It was shown that, with the integration of texture and coherence features, the producer's accuracy for afforested land, young forest land, medium forest land, and near-mature forest land improved by 6%, 31%, 11%, and 6%, respectively, compared with the former experiment using solely polarimetric features. Our study indicates that the forest and non-forest lands can be discriminated by the polarimetric features, which also play an important role in the separation between afforested land and other forest types as well as medium forest land and near-mature forest land. The texture features further discriminate afforested land and other forest types, while the coherence features obviously improved the separation of young forest land and medium forest land. This paper provides an effective way of identifying various land use/cover types, especially for distinguishing forest growth stages with SAR data. It would be of great interest in regions with frequent cloud coverage and limited optical data for the monitoring of land use/cover types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The calibration pipeline of the level zero images obtained from the Magneto-Optical filters at Two Heights (MOTH II) instrument is presented. MOTH II consists of two 20 cm aperture instruments, each using a Magneto-Optical Filter (MOF): one at 5896 Å (Na D2-line), the other one at 7700 Å (K I-line). MOTH II instruments thus provide full disk line-of-sight Doppler velocity and magnetic field measurements at two heights in the solar atmosphere. The developed MOTH II pipeline employs a set of standard calibration corrections, a correction for signal leakage, due to the non-ideal behavior of the polarizers, and the geometrical registration between the eight images acquired by four CMOS cameras, relative to two components of the signal in two circular polarization states, in each of the two channels. MOTH II data are used to investigate atmospheric dynamics (e.g., internal gravity waves and magneto-acoustic portals) and Space Weather phenomena. Particularly, flare forecasting algorithms, based on the detection of magnetic active regions (ARs) and associated flare probability estimation, are currently under development. The possible matching of MOTH II data with SDO/HMI and SDO/AIA images into a flux rope model, developed in collaboration between Harvard-Smithsonian CfA and MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science, is being tested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rice phenology information is critical for farm management and productivity evaluation. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical remote sensing data are very useful for monitoring rice growth. Therefore, this paper focuses on building a robust, accurate and operational scheme for phenology estimation based on SAR and multispectral remote sensing data. The proposed scheme has three main improvements. First, two main types of rice field - transplanted indica rice field (TRF) and direct-sown japonica rice field (DRF) - were considered individually. Second, 149 SAR signatures and optical Vegetation Indices (VIs) were extracted from time-series of optical and full/compact-pol SAR data and a novel feature selection method based on Monte Carlo experiments and the correlation limitation (MCCL) was proposed. Third, six different phenological labeling cases were considered, with the multiclass relevant vector machine (mRVM) being used to identify different stages. Based on the improvements above, we generated the optimal feature matrix based on the MCCL; this matrix consisted of the optimal feature subset (OFS) used for the identification of each stage. The overall phenological estimation accuracy (OPEA) based on the optical VIs and SAR signatures together (86.59%), was shown to be better than that based on either the optical VIs or the SAR signatures only. In addition, it was significant to consider the differences between the DRF and TRF for rice phenology estimation. The OPEA was higher than 85% when the DRF and TRF were considered separately, much higher than the accuracy obtained (68.89%) when the differences between the DRF and TRF were ignored. Lastly, the availability of the proposed feature selection method MCCL was discussed. It was found that the best OPEA was generated using the OFS selected by the proposed MCCL when the dimensions of the OFS were kept small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study investigated the potential of multi-temporal polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data of RISAT-1 for monitoring and discrimination of cotton and groundnut area where special emphasis was given to the signature analysis of the crop for two consecutive years viz., kharif2013-14 and 2014-15. The study area was selected in major cotton and groundnut producing districts of Gujarat state which accounts for 85-90% of total area. The SAR (C -band) backscatter is the function of temporal behavior due to interaction of microwave radiation with soil moisture, soil roughness, soil type and other crop parameters including crop canopy and volume scattering increasing from the early vegetative stage to harvesting stage and the backscattering of different region for both HH and HV polarizations. The change in backscatter of the order of 2 to 4 dB in C-band was observed. Cotton and groundnut crops were classified based on backscatter values and cotton was further classified in desi (indigenous) cotton, early sown, timely sown and late sown category for hybrid cotton depending on its time of sowing. Variation in backscatter profile with respect to sowing time was observed depending on rainfall availability in different regions. Hierarchical decision rule model based on the temporal evaluation of SAR backscatter was attempted to classify cotton, groundnut and other land covers achieved about 89 per cent accuracy in the case of cotton and about 85 per cent for groundnut. This output was very consistent in the irrigated tracts of Gujarat for cotton crop. This methodology would be crucial for monitoring and early estimation of cotton area in the country and cotton-groundnut discrimination when cloud free optical data is a major hindrance to the crop inventory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM) is a candidate for the missing baryons in the Universe. If the WHIM is permeated with the intergalactic magnetic field (IGMF), the Faraday rotation measure (RM) of the WHIM is imprinted in linearly-polarized emission from extragalactic objects. In this article, we discuss strategies to explore the WHIM’s RM from forthcoming radio broadband and wide-field polarization sky surveys. There will be two observational breakthroughs in the coming decades; the RM grid and Faraday tomography. They will allow us to find ideal RM sources for the study of the IGMF and give us unique information of the WHIM along the line of sight.