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Dielectric constant for the earth and planetary surfaces has been estimated using reflection coefficients in the past. A recent trend is to use model-based decomposition for dielectric constant retrieval from polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (polSAR) data. We examine the reported literature in this regard and propose a unique dielectric constant estimation (UDCE) algorithm using three-component decomposition technique. In UDCE, the dielectric constant is obtained directly from one of the elements of the measured coherency matrix in a single step. The dielectric constant estimate from the UDCE is independent of the volume scattering model when single-bounce or double-bounce scattering is dominant. This avoids error propagation from overestimation of volume scattering to the copolarization ratios, and in turn, to the dielectric constant, inherent in reported algorithms that use model-based decomposition. Consequently, a unique solution is obtained. We also demonstrate that the solution from the UDCE is unaffected by using a higher-order model-based decomposition. We evaluate the performance of the proposed UDCE algorithm over three Apollo 12, Apollo 15, and Apollo 17 landing sites on the lunar surface using Chandrayaan- 2 dual-frequency synthetic aperture radar (DFSAR) datasets. An excellent convergence rate for dielectric constant estimation is maintained over all three test sites. Using the proposed UDCE algorithm, the dielectric constant maps are produced for the lunar surface using full polSAR data for the first time. We observe that the generated dielectric constant maps capture all the ground truth features, previously unseen with such clarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

L-band spaceborne polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data has been well used for the high-resolution retrieval of the ionospheric Faraday rotation (FR). A vast majority of these retrievals were, however, conducted on PolSAR data of lands, with only a very few over oceans. For the global imaging of the Earth's ionosphere, the retrieval of oceanic ionosphere is indispensable. This paper aims to furnish a deep insight into the FR retrieval on oceans using the widely used Bickel-Bates estimator based on the two cross-circular polarizations ${Z_{12}}$ Z 12 and ${Z_{21}}$ Z 21 . The FR estimates (FRE) on oceans are evaluated in detail by comparing with those on lands on four ALOS PALSAR datasets. The achieved oceanic FRE are shown to possess comparable or even better quality than those on lands. It occurs in three of the four scenes that the selected ocean sub-area holds a smaller standard deviation (STD) of FRE (less than 0.7000°) than all the selected land sub-areas. Especially, the quality of FRE is shown to be closely linked to the dispersed degree of the magnitude of the conjugate product of ${Z_{12}}$ Z 12 and ${Z_{21}}$ Z 21 via the analysis of coefficient of variation (CV), according to which the unusual occurrence of larger magnitude level corresponding to larger STD of FRE can be explained. Nevertheless, compared with CV, the magnitude of the polarimetric coherence between ${Z_{12}}$ Z 12 and ${Z_{21}}$ Z 21 (i.e. $\left| \gamma \right|$ γ ) is identified as a better index to measure the quality of FRE. A smaller STD of FRE appears along with a larger $\left| \gamma \right|$ γ . Three of the four scenes show that the selected ocean sub-area bears a larger mean of $\left| \gamma \right|$ γ (greater than 0.9890) in comparison with all the selected land sub-areas. This work can promote the ionospheric research over oceans and to the correction of ionospheric effects in oceanic L-band spaceborne polarimetric radar data as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The penetration capability of electromagnetic wave signal into forest increases with increasing wavelength. SAR data at each frequency senses different components of forest structure. Therefore the biomass distributed at various tree components could be estimated using different radar frequencies. Additionally, the synthesis of multiple SAR frequencies could improve the accuracy in retrieving forest above-ground biomass (AGB). Taking advantage of available X-, C-, L-, and P-band quad-polarimetric SAR images of airborne or spaceborne for the test site located at Genhe national forest scientific field station, we used a Genetic Algorithm and Support Vector Regression optimization algorithm (GA-SVR) to explore the sensitivity of polarimetric observations at various frequencies to forest AGB and effectiveness of AGB retrievals using single-frequency, dual-frequency, triple-frequency, and quad-frequency SAR observation combinations. We found that: (i) Most of the polarimetric observations are sensitive to forest AGB, (ii) GA-SVR performed well in forest AGB retrieval using the single frequency SAR observations or combinations of multi-frequency observations; the highest Acc. value for single-frequency-retrieved results is 75.13% acquired at P-band, with multi-frequency, the highest Acc. values is 77.34% acquired by combining C- and P-band. (iii) For forest AGB retrievals, the single-frequency P-band accuracy is comparable to the combined C- and P-band retrieval accuracy, indicating that the long-wavelength single-frequency P-band is sufficient for an accurate forest AGB retrieval. The findings reconfirmed potential of P-band for forest AGB retrievals, they also demonstrated that the optimal combination of multi-frequency SAR for AGB retrievals is by using a short-wavelength (X/C-) and a long-wavelength (L/P-).

Timely monitoring of distribution and growth state of crops is crucial for agricultural management. Remote sensing (RS) techniques provide an effective tool to monitor crops. This study proposes a novel approach for the identification of typical crops, including rapeseed and wheat, using multisource remote sensing data and deep learning technology. By adopting an improved DeepLabV3+ network architecture that integrates a feature-enhanced module and an attention module, multiple features from both optical data and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data are fully mined to take into account the spectral reflectance traits and polarimetric scattering straits of crops. The proposal can effectively address the limitations of using a single data source, alleviating the misclassification problem brought by the spectral similarity of crops in certain bands. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed crop identification DeepLabV3+ (CI-DeepLabV3+) method outperforms traditional classification methods and the original DeepLabV3+ network, with an overall accuracy and F1 score of 94.54% and 94.55%, respectively. Experimental results also support the conclusion that using multiple features from multi-source data can indeed improve the performance of the network.

Land cover classification using high-resolution Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) images obtained from satellites is a challenging task. While deep learning algorithms have been extensively studied for PolSAR image land cover classification, the performance is severely constrained due to the scarcity of labeled PolSAR samples and the limited domain acceptance of models. Recently, the emergence of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) based on the vision transformer (VIT) model has brought about a revolution in the study of specific downstream tasks in computer vision. Benefiting from its millions of parameters and extensive training datasets, SAM demonstrates powerful capabilities in extracting semantic information and generalization. To this end, we propose a dual-stream feature extraction network based on SAM, i.e., BSDSNet. We change the image encoder part of SAM to a dual stream, where the ConvNext image encoder is utilized to extract local information and the VIT image encoder is used to extract global information. BSDSNet achieves an in-depth exploration of semantic and spatial information in PolSAR images. Additionally, to facilitate a fine-grained amalgamation of information, the SA-Gate module is employed to integrate local–global information. Compared to previous deep learning models, BSDSNet's impressive ability to represent features is akin to a versatile receptive field, making it well suited for classifying PolSAR images across various resolutions. Comprehensive evaluations indicate that BSDSNet achieves excellent results in qualitative and quantitative evaluation when performing classification tasks on the AIR-PolSAR-Seg dataset and the WHU-OPT-SAR dataset. Compared to the suboptimal results, our method improves the Kappa metric by 3.68% and 0.44% on the AIR-PolSAR-Seg dataset and the WHU-OPT-SAR dataset, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sea-ice mapping using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) in the melt season poses challenges, primarily due to meltwater complicating the distinguishability of sea-ice types. In response to this issue, this study introduces a novel method for classifying sea ice during the Bohai Sea's melting period. The method categorizes sea ice into five types: open water (OW), gray ice (Gi), melting gray ice (GiW), gray–white Ice (Gw), and melting gray–white Ice (GwW). To achieve this classification, 51 polarimetric features are extracted from L-, S-, and C-band PolSAR data using various polarization decomposition methods. This study assesses the separability of these features among different combinations of sea-ice type by calculating the Euclidean distance (ED). The Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, when employed with single-frequency polarimetric feature sets, achieves the highest accuracy for OW and Gi in the C-band, GiW in the S-band, and Gw and GwW in the L-band. Remarkably, the C-band features exhibit the overall highest accuracy when compared to the L-band and S-band. Furthermore, employing a multi-dimensional polarimetric feature set significantly improves classification accuracy to 94.55%, representing a substantial enhancement of 9% to 22% compared to single-frequency classification. Benefiting from the performance advantages of Random Forest (RF) classifiers in handling large datasets, RF classifiers achieve the highest classification accuracy of 95.84%. The optimal multi-dimensional feature composition includes the following: L-band: SE, SEI, α ¯ , Span; S-band: SEI, SE, Span, PV-Freeman, λ1, λ2; C-band: SE, SEI, Span, λ3, PV-Freeman. The results of this study provide a reliable new method for future sea-ice monitoring during the melting season. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearshore ship detection has significant applications in both the military and civilian domains. Compared to synthetic aperture radar (SAR), polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) provides richer information for analyzing the scattering mechanisms of ships and enables better detection of ship targets. However, ships in nearshore areas tend to be highly concentrated, and ship detection is often affected by adjacent strong scattering, resulting in false alarms or missed detections. While the GP-PNF detector performs well in PolSAR ship detection, it cannot obtain satisfactory results in these scenarios, and it also struggles in the presence of azimuthal ambiguity or strong clutter interference. To address these challenges, we propose a nearshore ship detection method named ECD-PNF by integrating superpixel-level GP-PNF and refined polarimetric decomposition. Firstly, polarimetric superpixel segmentation and sea–land segmentation are performed to reduce the influence of land on ship detection. To estimate the sea clutter more accurately, an automatic censoring (AC) mechanism combined with superpixels is used to select the sea clutter superpixels. By utilizing refined eight-component polarimetric decomposition to improve the scattering vector, the physical interpretability of the detector is enhanced. Additionally, the expression of polarimetric coherence is improved to enhance the target clutter ratio (TCR). Finally, this paper combines the third eigenvalue of eigenvalue–eigenvector decomposition to reduce the impact of azimuthal ambiguity. Three spaceborne PolSAR datasets from Radarsat-2 and GF-3 are adopted in the experiments for comparison. The proposed ECD-PNF method achieves the highest figure of merit (FoM) value of 0.980, 1.000, and 1.000 for three datasets, validating the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Influenced by the diversified target structures and complex electromagnetic environments, accurate maritime ship detection using polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) remains an intractable and open-ended problem. In this paper, a discriminative polarimetric ship detector is proposed, in which the physical scattering characterization is emphasized throughout. Specifically, based on the adequate perception of relationship between target scattering and geometric structure, a set of scattering structure angles is firstly designed, which can be used to directly extract the scattering type information. Subsequently, by modulating the total scattering power with the scattering structure angles, a concise polarimetric decomposition scheme is proposed, which can reasonably describe the global and local ship structure scattering. At last, through integrating the output scattering contributions into information entropy theory, a ship detector called cross contribution entropy is constructed, which can effectively highlight the interested ships and remarkably suppress the background interferences. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed methodologies are subjectively and objectively validated with real PolSAR data with different marine backgrounds compared with other state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed method can achieve the highest figure-of-merit (FoM) and significantly enhance the target-to-clutter ratio.

A new framework in the form of Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) image classification, where deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) were integrated with the traditional Machine Learning (ML) techniques under a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) architecture, was introduced in the paper. The main aim behind this new approach is to overcome the severe limitations inherent in both deep CNN and conventional ML approaches. The application of the sliding-window strategy eliminates the necessity of requiring extensive feature extraction procedures while reducing computational complexity simultaneously. Experiments on four benchmark PolSAR datasets for C-Band, L-Band, AIRSAR, and RADARSAT-2 data attest to the framework's remarkable classification accuracies in the range of 94.55% to 99.39%. This integrated framework is thus a significant advancement in PolSAR image analysis in offering an efficient methodology that combines the strengths of deep CNNs and traditional ML, by mitigating their respective limitations. It also combines the sliding-window technique with the architecture of TCN and then yields excellent classification accuracy with no much additional computational overhead. The results obtained thus indicate a good chance of revolutionizing the state of the art in PolSAR image classification, providing crucial efficiency improvements and making applications in environmental applications stronger, across almost all kinds of fields.

Forest aboveground biomass (AGB) retrieval using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) backscatter has received extensive attention. The water cloud model (WCM), because of its simplicity and physical significance, has been one of the most commonly used models for estimating forest AGB using SAR backscatter. Nevertheless, forest AGB estimation using the WCM is usually based on simplified assumptions and empirical fitting, leading to results that tend to overestimate or underestimate. Moreover, the physical connection between the model and the polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) is not established, which leads to the limitation of the inversion scale. In this paper, based on the fully polarimetric SAR data from the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS-2) Phased Array-type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR-2), the relative contributions of the three major scattering mechanisms were first analyzed in a hilly area of southern China. On this basis, the traditional WCM was extended by considering the secondary scattering mechanism. Then, to establish the direct relationship between the vegetation scattering mechanism and forest AGB, a new relationship equation between the PolSAR decomposition model and the improved water cloud model (I-WCM) was constructed without the help of external data. Finally, a nonlinear iterative method was used to estimate the forest AGB. The results show that volume scattering is the dominant mechanism, accounting for more than 60%. Double-bounce scattering accounts for the smallest fraction, but still about 10%, which means that the contribution of the double-bounce scattering component is not negligible in forested areas because of the strong penetration capability of the long-wave SAR. The modified method provides a correlation coefficient R2 of 0.665 and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 21.902, which is an improvement of 36.42% compared to the traditional fitting method. Moreover, it enables the extraction of forest parameters at the pix scale using PolSAR data without the need for low-resolution external data and is thus helpful for high-resolution mapping of forest AGB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an information enhancement network based on self-supervised learning (SEL-Net) for runway area detection. During the self-supervised learning phase, the distinctive attributes of PolSAR multi-channel data are fully harnessed to enhance the generated pretrained model's focus on airport runway areas. During the detection phase, this paper presents an improved U-Net detection network. Edge Feature Extraction Modules (EEM) are integrated into the encoder and skip connection sections, while Semantic Information Transmission Modules (STM) are embedded into the decoder section. Furthermore, improvements have been applied to the network's upsampling and downsampling architectures. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SEL-Net effectively addresses the issues of high false alarms and runway integrity, achieving a superior detection performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Influenced by the imaging mechanism, the occurrence of interference clutter in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) renders the identification of false alarms using detectors challenging. Polarimetric SAR has the potential to improve ship detection performance owing to its distinctive polarization characteristics. The present study proposes a dualistic cascade convolutional neural network (DCCNN) algorithm driven by polarization characteristics for ship detection with fully PolSAR data. First, the new characterizations of fully PolSAR data—Optimized SPAN (OSPAN) and 6-D polarization vector (P 6), were mined and defined based on the polarization coherence matrix to introduce more intact information of targets. Then, a backbone feature extraction network with parallel dualistic cascade architecture, basic geometric feature extraction network (BGFENet), and polarization feature enhancement network (PFENet) was specifically constructed, which provided the comprehensive feature representation of targets via feature fusion. Finally, the classification and regression tasks were accomplished in the fully convolutional detection subnetwork relying on extracted multi-scale fusion feature maps, while focusing on target location regression, leading to a decrease in the cost of detection efficiency caused by redundant PFENet. In addition, the corresponding training strategy according to the special architecture of DCCNN was designed to overcome the problem of labeled fully PolSAR data insufficiency and migrate refined geometric knowledge of targets in the single-polarization SAR amplitude image. Experimental results on the established fully polarized SAR dataset show that DCCNN outperforms the competitive CNN-based target detection methods by at least 6.79% in terms of average precision. Moreover, experimental results on the typical large scenes show that DCCNN is at least 0.88% higher than the well-known conventional methods in terms of F 1 score. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearshore ship detection has significant applications in both the military and civilian domains. Compared to synthetic aperture radar (SAR), polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) provides richer information for analyzing the scattering mechanisms of ships and enables better detection of ship targets. However, ships in nearshore areas tend to be highly concentrated, and ship detection is often affected by adjacent strong scattering, resulting in false alarms or missed detections. While the GP-PNF detector performs well in PolSAR ship detection, it cannot obtain satisfactory results in these scenarios, and it also struggles in the presence of azimuthal ambiguity or strong clutter interference. To address these challenges, we propose a nearshore ship detection method named ECD-PNF by integrating superpixel-level GP-PNF and refined polarimetric decomposition. Firstly, polarimetric superpixel segmentation and sea–land segmentation are performed to reduce the influence of land on ship detection. To estimate the sea clutter more accurately, an automatic censoring (AC) mechanism combined with superpixels is used to select the sea clutter superpixels. By utilizing refined eight-component polarimetric decomposition to improve the scattering vector, the physical interpretability of the detector is enhanced. Additionally, the expression of polarimetric coherence is improved to enhance the target clutter ratio (TCR). Finally, this paper combines the third eigenvalue of eigenvalue–eigenvector decomposition to reduce the impact of azimuthal ambiguity. Three spaceborne PolSAR datasets from Radarsat-2 and GF-3 are adopted in the experiments for comparison. The proposed ECD-PNF method achieves the highest figure of merit (FoM) value of 0.980, 1.000, and 1.000 for three datasets, validating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Sea-ice mapping using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) in the melt season poses challenges, primarily due to meltwater complicating the distinguishability of sea-ice types. In response to this issue, this study introduces a novel method for classifying sea ice during the Bohai Sea’s melting period. The method categorizes sea ice into five types: open water (OW), gray ice (Gi), melting gray ice (GiW), gray–white Ice (Gw), and melting gray–white Ice (GwW). To achieve this classification, 51 polarimetric features are extracted from L-, S-, and C-band PolSAR data using various polarization decomposition methods. This study assesses the separability of these features among different combinations of sea-ice type by calculating the Euclidean distance (ED). The Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, when employed with single-frequency polarimetric feature sets, achieves the highest accuracy for OW and Gi in the C-band, GiW in the S-band, and Gw and GwW in the L-band. Remarkably, the C-band features exhibit the overall highest accuracy when compared to the L-band and S-band. Furthermore, employing a multi-dimensional polarimetric feature set significantly improves classification accuracy to 94.55%, representing a substantial enhancement of 9% to 22% compared to single-frequency classification. Benefiting from the performance advantages of Random Forest (RF) classifiers in handling large datasets, RF classifiers achieve the highest classification accuracy of 95.84%. The optimal multi-dimensional feature composition includes the following: L-band: SE, SEI, α¯, Span; S-band: SEI, SE, Span, PV-Freeman, λ1, λ2; C-band: SE, SEI, Span, λ3, PV-Freeman. The results of this study provide a reliable new method for future sea-ice monitoring during the melting season.

Land cover classification using high-resolution Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) images obtained from satellites is a challenging task. While deep learning algorithms have been extensively studied for PolSAR image land cover classification, the performance is severely constrained due to the scarcity of labeled PolSAR samples and the limited domain acceptance of models. Recently, the emergence of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) based on the vision transformer (VIT) model has brought about a revolution in the study of specific downstream tasks in computer vision. Benefiting from its millions of parameters and extensive training datasets, SAM demonstrates powerful capabilities in extracting semantic information and generalization. To this end, we propose a dual-stream feature extraction network based on SAM, i.e., BSDSNet. We change the image encoder part of SAM to a dual stream, where the ConvNext image encoder is utilized to extract local information and the VIT image encoder is used to extract global information. BSDSNet achieves an in-depth exploration of semantic and spatial information in PolSAR images. Additionally, to facilitate a fine-grained amalgamation of information, the SA-Gate module is employed to integrate local–global information. Compared to previous deep learning models, BSDSNet’s impressive ability to represent features is akin to a versatile receptive field, making it well suited for classifying PolSAR images across various resolutions. Comprehensive evaluations indicate that BSDSNet achieves excellent results in qualitative and quantitative evaluation when performing classification tasks on the AIR-PolSAR-Seg dataset and the WHU-OPT-SAR dataset. Compared to the suboptimal results, our method improves the Kappa metric by 3.68% and 0.44% on the AIR-PolSAR-Seg dataset and the WHU-OPT-SAR dataset, respectively.

Highly accurate supervised deep learning-based classifiers for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images require large amounts of data with manual annotations. Unfortunately, the complex echo imaging mechanism results in a high labeling cost for PolSAR images. Extracting and transferring knowledge to utilize the existing labeled data to the fullest extent is a viable approach in such circumstances. To this end, we are introducing unsupervised deep adversarial domain adaptation (ADA) into PolSAR image classification for the first time. In contrast to the standard learning paradigm, in this study, the deep learning model is trained on labeled data from a source domain and unlabeled data from a related but distinct target domain. The purpose of this is to extract domain-invariant features and generalize them to the target domain. Although the feature transferability of ADA methods can be ensured through adversarial training to align the feature distributions of source and target domains, improving feature discriminability remains a crucial issue. In this paper, we propose a novel polarimetric scattering characteristics-guided adversarial network (PSCAN) for unsupervised PolSAR image classification. Compared with classical ADA methods, we designed an auxiliary task for PSCAN based on the polarimetric scattering characteristics-guided pseudo-label construction. This approach utilizes the rich information contained in the PolSAR data itself, without the need for expensive manual annotations or complex automatic labeling mechanisms. During the training of PSCAN, the auxiliary task receives category semantic information from pseudo-labels and helps promote the discriminability of the learned domain-invariant features, thereby enabling the model to have a better target prediction function. The effectiveness of the proposed method was demonstrated using data captured with different PolSAR systems in the San Francisco and Qingdao areas. Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain satisfactory unsupervised classification results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, semantic segmentation with pixel-level classification has become one of the types of research focus in the field of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image interpretation. Fully convolutional network (FCN) can achieve end-to-end semantic segmentation, which provides a basic framework for subsequent improved networks. As a classic FCN-based network, U-Net has been applied to semantic segmentation of remote sensing images. Although good segmentation results have been obtained, scalar neurons have made it difficult for the network to obtain multiple properties of entities in the image. The vector neurons used in the capsule network can effectively solve this problem. In this paper, we propose a complex-valued (CV) U-Net with a CV capsule network embedded for semantic segmentation of a PolSAR image. The structure of CV U-Net is lightweight to match the small PolSAR data, and the embedded CV capsule network is designed to extract more abundant features of the PolSAR image than the CV U-Net. Furthermore, CV dynamic routing is proposed to realize the connection between capsules in two adjacent layers. Experiments on two airborne datasets and one Gaofen-3 dataset show that the proposed network is capable of distinguishing different types of land covers with a similar scattering mechanism and extracting complex boundaries between two adjacent land covers. The network achieves better segmentation performance than other state-of-art networks, especially when the training set size is small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the unsupervised classification problem for multilook polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images via proposing a new spatially variant G p 0 mixture model based on the extended variational inference (SV G p 0 MM-EVI). Specifically, an SV G p 0 MM is constructed by associating data points with their own mixing coefficient vectors rather than sharing the same vector, which provides the additional flexibility to incorporate the spatial context and further effectively deal with the more heterogeneous areas than G p 0 MM. Then, an extended variational inference (EVI) algorithm is derived to facilitate the assignment of the conjugate prior distributions and accurately estimate the underlying parameters, in which two "help" functions are specially designed to solve the intractable variational lower bound. Meanwhile, dual spatial constraints based on the Bartlett distance and the mean template are also explored on polarimetric matrix and the hyperparameter in the posteriori distribution of mixing coefficients, respectively, thus adequately capturing the local correlation from the polarimetric matrix and the geometry perspectives. Furthermore, the learning algorithm with all the closed-form updates is developed and the cluster number could be automatically determined. Five PolSAR data sets (including two labeled data sets), which are obtained by different sensors, are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed SV G p 0 MM-EVI is beneficial to classification task of PolSAR images, and achieves higher accuracy (e.g., 95.65% and 97.41% OA values) compared with some widely-used methods (i.e., H/ α -Wishart, Chernoff–Wishart, G p 0 MM, SVWMM and CK-HDRF methods). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images containing polarimetric, scattering and contextual features are useful radar data for ground surface classification. Appropriate feature extraction and fusion by using a small set of available labeled samples is an important and challenging task. Several transformers with self-attention mechanism have recently achieved great success for PolSAR image classification. While almost all methods just exploit the self-attention features from the PolSAR cube, the feature fusion method proposed in this work, which is called attention based scattering and contextual (ASC) network, utilizes the polarimetric self-attention beside two cross-attention blocks. The cross-attention blocks extract the polarimetric-scattering dependencies and polarimetric-contextual interactions, individually. The proposed ASC network uses three inputs: the PolSAR cube, the scattering feature maps obtained by clustering of the entropy-alpha features, and the segmentation maps obtained by a super-pixel generation algorithm. The features extracted by self- and cross-attention blocks are fused together, and the residual learning improves the feature learning. While transformers and attention-based networks usually need large training sets, the proposed ASC network shows high efficiency with relatively low number of training samples in various real and synthetic PolSAR images. For example, in the Flevoland PolSAR image containing 15 classes acquired by AIRSAR in L-band, with using 100 training samples per class (less than 1% of labeled samples), the ASC network achieves the overall accuracy of 99.51, which is statistically preferred than the self-attention-based network according to the McNemars test. • An attention-based feature fusion network is proposed for polarimetric SAR image classification. • A self-attention block is suggested to highlight the high important polarimetric features. • Methods for unsupervised generation of scattering and contextual feature maps are introduced. • A cross-attention block is proposed to explore the polarimetric-scattering dependencies. • A cross-attention block is proposed to explore the polarimetric-contextual relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an in-depth statistical comparison among several Complex-Valued Neural Network (CVNN) models on the Oberpfaffenhofen Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) database and compare them against Real-Valued Neural Network (RVNN) architectures. The necessity to define the equivalence between the models emerges in order to compare both networks fairly. A novel definition for an equivalent-RVNN in terms of real-valued trainable parameters that maintain the aspect ratio is extended for convolutional layers based on previous work Barrachina et al. (2021 IEEE 31st International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP), 2021). We illustrate that CVNN obtains better statistical performance for classification on the PolSAR image across a range of architectures than a capacity equivalent-RVNN, indicating that this behavior is likely independent of the model itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Wishart mixture model is an effective tool for characterizing the statistical distribution of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data. However, due to the difficulty in determining the equivalent number of looks, the Wishart mixture model has some problems in terms of practicality. In addition, the flexibility of the Wishart mixture model needs to be improved for complicated scenes. To improve the practicality and flexibility, a new mixture model named the relaxed Wishart mixture model (RWMM) is proposed. In RWMM, the equivalent number of looks is no longer considered a constant for the whole PolSAR image but a variable that varies between different clusters. Next, an innovative algorithm named RWMM-Markov random field (RWMM-MRFt) for supervised classification is proposed. A new selection criterion for adaptive neighborhood systems is proposed in the algorithm to improve the classification performance. The new criterion makes effective use of PolSAR scattering information to select the most suitable neighborhood for each center pixel in PolSAR images. Three datasets, including one simulated image and two real PolSAR images, are utilized in the experiment. The maximum likelihood classification results demonstrate the flexibility of the proposed RWMM for modeling PolSAR data. The proposed selection criterion shows superior performance than the span-based selection criterion. Among the mixture model-based MRF classification algorithms, the proposed RWMM-MRFt algorithm has the highest classification accuracy, and the corresponding classification maps have better anti-noise performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article was to investigate the potential of polarimetric decomposition of Chinese Gaofen-3 (GF-3) C-band fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data for Arctic sea ice classification during summer season. Five different polarimetric decomposition approaches, including the Cloude-Pottier decomposition (Cloude), the Freeman three-component decomposition (Freeman3), the Freeman three-component decomposition using the extended Bragg model (Freeman3X), the Yamaguchi three-component decomposition (Yamaguchi3), and the nonnegative eigenvalue decomposition (NNED) were analyzed using 35 scenes of GF-3 PolSAR data collected over the Fram Strait, Arctic from June 14–18, 2017. Polarimetric features extracted from these five methods were evaluated and utilized to train random forest classifiers to classify open water (calm water and rough water) and sea ice types (melted ice, unmelted ice, and deformed ice). The results show that NNED could ensure physically valid decomposed powers while the other three model-based decompositions had negative values. In terms of sea ice classification, NNED had the highest feature importance scores and achieved an overall accuracy and Kappa coefficient of about 86.18% and 0.82, respectively. Inclusion of radar incidence angle as a feature in the classifier could slightly improve the classification accuracy by about 3%. The influence of incidence angle on sea ice classification accuracy was also investigated and it was found that high incidence angles (39°–46°) were superior to low incidence angles (21°–27°) due to the overall higher accuracies.

This paper proposes an information enhancement network based on self-supervised learning (SEL-Net) for runway area detection. During the self-supervised learning phase, the distinctive attributes of PolSAR multi-channel data are fully harnessed to enhance the generated pretrained model’s focus on airport runway areas. During the detection phase, this paper presents an improved U-Net detection network. Edge Feature Extraction Modules (EEM) are integrated into the encoder and skip connection sections, while Semantic Information Transmission Modules (STM) are embedded into the decoder section. Furthermore, improvements have been applied to the network’s upsampling and downsampling architectures. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SEL-Net effectively addresses the issues of high false alarms and runway integrity, achieving a superior detection performance.

Rice is one of the most important food crops for human beings. The timely and accurate understanding of the distribution of rice can provide an important scientific basis for food security, agricultural policy formulation, and regional development planning. As an active remote sensing system, polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) has the advantage of working both day and night and in all weather conditions and hence plays an important role in rice growing area identification. This paper focuses on the topic of rice planting area identification using multi-temporal PolSAR images and a deep learning method. A rice planting area identification attention U-Net (RIAU-Net) model is proposed, which is trained by multi-temporal Sentinel-1 dual-polarimetric images acquired in different periods of rice growth. In addition, considering the diversity of the rice growth period in different years caused by the different climatic conditions and other factors, a transfer mechanism is investigated to apply the well-trained model to monitor the rice planting areas in different years. The experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the classification accuracy, with 11–14% F1-score improvement compared with the traditional methods and a pleasing generalization ability in different years. Moreover, the classified rice planting regions are continuous. For reproducibility, the source codes of the well-trained RIAU-Net model are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Superpixel segmentation is widely used in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification. However, the classification method using simple majority voting cannot easily handle evidence conflicts in a single superpixel. At present, there is no method to evaluate the quality of superpixel classification. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a hybrid classification model based on superpixel entropy discrimination (SED), and constructs a two-level cascade classifier. Firstly, a light gradient boosting machine (LGBM) was used to process large-dimensional input features, and simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) was integrated to obtain the primary classification results based on superpixels. Secondly, information entropy was introduced to evaluate the quality of superpixel classification, and a complex-valued convolutional neural network (CV-CNN) was used to reclassify the high-entropy superpixels to obtain the secondary classification results. Experiments with two measured PolSAR datasets show that the overall accuracy of both classification methods exceeded 97%. This method suppressed the evidence conflict in a single superpixel and the inaccuracy of superpixel segmentation. The test time of our proposed method was shorter than that of CV-CNN, and using only 55% of CV-CNN test data could achieve the same accuracy as using CV-CNN for the whole image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Machine learning classifier‑based water body extraction methods for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images have high reliability but typically require a great number of training samples. Consequently, it is very difficult and time‑consuming to manually collect enough training samples when extracting water body from multi‑temporal PolSAR images. To this problem, transfer learning is used to reduce the labor cost of querying new samples and improve the timeliness of water body extraction of multi‑temporal PolSAR images. Methods: Firstly, an optimal source domain image from multi‑temporal images is automatically selected according to the distribution difference between images, and the other images are taken as target domain images. Secondly, a group of training samples are queried in the source domain image as source sample set, and the same number of unlabeled samples are randomly sampled from each target domain image as their target domain sample set. And the knowledge of source domain samples is transferred to target domain samples via the transfer learning method. Finally, a random forest classifier‑based water body extraction model is trained using the target domain sample set, and is used for the water body extraction of target domain images. Results: We have conducted experiments using six PolSAR images and two kinds of transfer learning methods, the results show that:(1) The label transfer accuracy and the water body extraction accuracy are positively correlated. (2) Inductive transfer learning methods achieve higher label transfer accuracy and lower standard deviation. (3) A smaller distribution difference between source and target domain images indicate a greater transferability, and thus a better water body extraction accuracy. (4) The water body extraction results of inductive transfer learning methods have a higher rate of missing detection, while the results of transductive transfer learning methods have a higher rate of false detection. Conclusions: In the water body extraction of multi‑temporal PolSAR images, the use of transfer learning methods can significantly reduce the number of manually labeled samples needed to construct high‑performance classifiers, while maintaining the water body extraction accuracy at a high level. It has great application potentiality in the emergency response of flood disaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection of multiple interfering persistent scatterers (PSs) using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) tomography is an efficient tool for generating point clouds of urban areas. In this context, detection methods based upon the polarization information of SAR data are effective at increasing the number of PSs and producing high-density point clouds. This paper presents a comparative study on the effects of the polarization design of a radar antenna on further improving the probability of detecting persistent scatterers. For this purpose, we introduce an extension of the existing scattering property-based generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) with realistic dependence on the transmitted/received polarizations. The test is based upon polarization basis optimization by synthesizing all possible polarimetric responses of a given scatterer from its measurements on a linear orthonormal basis. Experiments on both simulated and real data show, by means of objective metrics (probability of detection, false alarm rate, and signal-to-noise ratio), that polarization waveform optimization can provide a significant performance gain in the detection of multiple scatterers compared to the existing full-polarization-based detection method. In particular, the increased density of detected PSs at the studied test sites demonstrates the main contribution of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highly accurate supervised deep learning-based classifiers for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images require large amounts of data with manual annotations. Unfortunately, the complex echo imaging mechanism results in a high labeling cost for PolSAR images. Extracting and transferring knowledge to utilize the existing labeled data to the fullest extent is a viable approach in such circumstances. To this end, we are introducing unsupervised deep adversarial domain adaptation (ADA) into PolSAR image classification for the first time. In contrast to the standard learning paradigm, in this study, the deep learning model is trained on labeled data from a source domain and unlabeled data from a related but distinct target domain. The purpose of this is to extract domain-invariant features and generalize them to the target domain. Although the feature transferability of ADA methods can be ensured through adversarial training to align the feature distributions of source and target domains, improving feature discriminability remains a crucial issue. In this paper, we propose a novel polarimetric scattering characteristics-guided adversarial network (PSCAN) for unsupervised PolSAR image classification. Compared with classical ADA methods, we designed an auxiliary task for PSCAN based on the polarimetric scattering characteristics-guided pseudo-label construction. This approach utilizes the rich information contained in the PolSAR data itself, without the need for expensive manual annotations or complex automatic labeling mechanisms. During the training of PSCAN, the auxiliary task receives category semantic information from pseudo-labels and helps promote the discriminability of the learned domain-invariant features, thereby enabling the model to have a better target prediction function. The effectiveness of the proposed method was demonstrated using data captured with different PolSAR systems in the San Francisco and Qingdao areas. Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain satisfactory unsupervised classification results.

In recent years, semantic segmentation with pixel-level classification has become one of the types of research focus in the field of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image interpretation. Fully convolutional network (FCN) can achieve end-to-end semantic segmentation, which provides a basic framework for subsequent improved networks. As a classic FCN-based network, U-Net has been applied to semantic segmentation of remote sensing images. Although good segmentation results have been obtained, scalar neurons have made it difficult for the network to obtain multiple properties of entities in the image. The vector neurons used in the capsule network can effectively solve this problem. In this paper, we propose a complex-valued (CV) U-Net with a CV capsule network embedded for semantic segmentation of a PolSAR image. The structure of CV U-Net is lightweight to match the small PolSAR data, and the embedded CV capsule network is designed to extract more abundant features of the PolSAR image than the CV U-Net. Furthermore, CV dynamic routing is proposed to realize the connection between capsules in two adjacent layers. Experiments on two airborne datasets and one Gaofen-3 dataset show that the proposed network is capable of distinguishing different types of land covers with a similar scattering mechanism and extracting complex boundaries between two adjacent land covers. The network achieves better segmentation performance than other state-of-art networks, especially when the training set size is small.

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The Wishart mixture model is an effective tool for characterizing the statistical distribution of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data. However, due to the difficulty in determining the equivalent number of looks, the Wishart mixture model has some problems in terms of practicality. In addition, the flexibility of the Wishart mixture model needs to be improved for complicated scenes. To improve the practicality and flexibility, a new mixture model named the relaxed Wishart mixture model (RWMM) is proposed. In RWMM, the equivalent number of looks is no longer considered a constant for the whole PolSAR image but a variable that varies between different clusters. Next, an innovative algorithm named RWMM-Markov random field (RWMM-MRFt) for supervised classification is proposed. A new selection criterion for adaptive neighborhood systems is proposed in the algorithm to improve the classification performance. The new criterion makes effective use of PolSAR scattering information to select the most suitable neighborhood for each center pixel in PolSAR images. Three datasets, including one simulated image and two real PolSAR images, are utilized in the experiment. The maximum likelihood classification results demonstrate the flexibility of the proposed RWMM for modeling PolSAR data. The proposed selection criterion shows superior performance than the span-based selection criterion. Among the mixture model-based MRF classification algorithms, the proposed RWMM-MRFt algorithm has the highest classification accuracy, and the corresponding classification maps have better anti-noise performance.

Aiming at exploiting the discriminative deep features and encoding the high-level structures, this letter presents a deep-features-based high-order triple discriminative random field model, abbreviated as DF-HoTDF, for nonstationary polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification. First, the DF-HoTDF model extracts the discriminative deep features by a graph-based complex-valued 3-D convolutional neural network (CV-3-D-CNN) and then constructs the unary potential by a negative log function. Second, it introduces an auxiliary field u to explicitly regulate the nonstationary label patterns of the PolSAR image and then constructs a pairwise potential guided by u to capture greater pairwise label interactions. Third, it defines a high-order potential on high-order cliques to encode high-level structures. Finally, under the discriminative model framework, the DF-HoTDF model has a weighted fusion of the unary potential, the pairwise potential, and the high-order potential. Then, with the DF-HoTDF model, we iteratively optimize the class label and the stationary maps until they converge. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DF-HoTDF model is of superior performances in nonstationary PolSAR image classification and that it can provide better label consistency in homogeneous region and better target structures and edge locations in heterogeneous region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rice is one of the most important food crops for human beings. The timely and accurate understanding of the distribution of rice can provide an important scientific basis for food security, agricultural policy formulation, and regional development planning. As an active remote sensing system, polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) has the advantage of working both day and night and in all weather conditions and hence plays an important role in rice growing area identification. This paper focuses on the topic of rice planting area identification using multi-temporal PolSAR images and a deep learning method. A rice planting area identification attention U-Net (RIAU-Net) model is proposed, which is trained by multi-temporal Sentinel-1 dual-polarimetric images acquired in different periods of rice growth. In addition, considering the diversity of the rice growth period in different years caused by the different climatic conditions and other factors, a transfer mechanism is investigated to apply the well-trained model to monitor the rice planting areas in different years. The experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the classification accuracy, with 11–14% F1-score improvement compared with the traditional methods and a pleasing generalization ability in different years. Moreover, the classified rice planting regions are continuous. For reproducibility, the source codes of the well-trained RIAU-Net model are provided.

Superpixel segmentation is widely used in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification. However, the classification method using simple majority voting cannot easily handle evidence conflicts in a single superpixel. At present, there is no method to evaluate the quality of superpixel classification. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a hybrid classification model based on superpixel entropy discrimination (SED), and constructs a two-level cascade classifier. Firstly, a light gradient boosting machine (LGBM) was used to process large-dimensional input features, and simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) was integrated to obtain the primary classification results based on superpixels. Secondly, information entropy was introduced to evaluate the quality of superpixel classification, and a complex-valued convolutional neural network (CV-CNN) was used to reclassify the high-entropy superpixels to obtain the secondary classification results. Experiments with two measured PolSAR datasets show that the overall accuracy of both classification methods exceeded 97%. This method suppressed the evidence conflict in a single superpixel and the inaccuracy of superpixel segmentation. The test time of our proposed method was shorter than that of CV-CNN, and using only 55% of CV-CNN test data could achieve the same accuracy as using CV-CNN for the whole image.

Land cover classification is an important application for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image interpretation. The classification performance of a promising parametric feature and classifier learning-based algorithm is limited when the amounts of pixels from different classes vary greatly. PolSAR data from minority classes is difficult to recognize correctly owing to a strong learning bias toward the majority classes, resulting in under-performing features for minority classes. To address this issue, a cost-sensitive latent space learning network based on the feature and classifier learning framework is proposed to reduce the learning bias for supporting the classification of imbalanced data in PolSAR images. First, a new cost-sensitive method is developed by adaptively computing the cost coefficient from predicted labels in the optimization process. Thus, the imbalanced distribution of PolSAR data can be obtained for both the labeled and unlabeled pixels rather than a predefined misclassifying matrix for labeled pixels. Second, latent space learning is used as an auxiliary task to assist the main task of classifier learning. By weighting the distance between the learned feature and the basis of the latent space with a different cost-sensitive coefficient, pixels in minority and majority classes are promoted to be more separable. Thus, the strong bias to majority classes is reduced from both the feature learning and classification process. Finally, the proposed method is studied through experiments on three different PolSAR images with several existing state-of-the-art methods. The experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed method for balanced and imbalanced PolSAR land cover classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retrieval of ionospheric parameters from spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and SAR interferometry observations has been developed in recent years because of its high spatial resolution. However, current studies are centered on the one-dimensional or two-dimensional ionospheric parameters, and there is a lack of retrieving three-dimensional ionospheric electron density. Based on this background, this study proposes an efficient method to map high-spatial-resolution three-dimensional electron density by combing of the full-polarimetric SAR images and International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) model. For a performance test of the proposed method, two L-band Advanced Land Observation Satellite Phase Array L-band SAR full-polarimetric SAR images over Alaska regions are processed. The high-spatial-resolution ionospheric parameters, including vertical total electron content and three-dimensional ionospheric electron density, are reconstructed over the study area. When comparing with the electron density derived from Poker Flat Incoherent Scatter Radar (PFISR) system, it is found that the IRI-derived electron density is obviously improved, where the standard deviations of differences between PFISR and IRI decrease, respectively, by ~2 and 1.5 times compared to those before the correction, demonstrating the reliability of the proposed method. This study can help us better understand the characteristics of ionospheric variation in space.

The cross-polarized scattering (HV) of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data is caused not only by forest but also by urban buildings with azimuth orientation angles. Since the general double scattering in model-based decomposition does not support their dominant scattering mechanism, it's still a challenge for modeling the scattering mechanism of oriented buildings. In this paper, the HV induced by oriented buildings is modeled by a rotated dihedral corner reflector. The cross scattering matrix of oriented building is obtained by averaging a cosine squared distribution with its peak at the dominant polarimetric orientation angle (DPOA) of an area and an adaptive width. The relation between DPOA and distribution width is acquired. Then an optimization strategy which eliminates the negative power and balances time and efficiency is proposed to estimate the scattering contributions. The proposed algorithm is tested on AIRSAR data of San Francisco and UAVSAR of San Diego and the results confirm the effectiveness.

The detection of multiple interfering persistent scatterers (PSs) using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) tomography is an efficient tool for generating point clouds of urban areas. In this context, detection methods based upon the polarization information of SAR data are effective at increasing the number of PSs and producing high-density point clouds. This paper presents a comparative study on the effects of the polarization design of a radar antenna on further improving the probability of detecting persistent scatterers. For this purpose, we introduce an extension of the existing scattering property-based generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) with realistic dependence on the transmitted/received polarizations. The test is based upon polarization basis optimization by synthesizing all possible polarimetric responses of a given scatterer from its measurements on a linear orthonormal basis. Experiments on both simulated and real data show, by means of objective metrics (probability of detection, false alarm rate, and signal-to-noise ratio), that polarization waveform optimization can provide a significant performance gain in the detection of multiple scatterers compared to the existing full-polarization-based detection method. In particular, the increased density of detected PSs at the studied test sites demonstrates the main contribution of the proposed method.

A new method based on the Looking-Around-and-Into (LAaI) mode is proposed for the task of change detection in large-scope Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) image. Specifically, the LAaI mode consists of two processes named Look-Around and Look-Into, which are accomplished by attention proposal network (APN) and recurrent convolutional neural network (CNN) (Recurrent CNN), respectively. The former provides certain subregions efficiently, and the latter detects changes in subregions accurately. In Look-Around, difference image (DI) of whole PolSAR images is calculated first to get global information; then, APN is established to locate the position of interested subregions intentionally by paying special attention to; next interested subregions that contain changed area in high probability are picked out as candidate-regions. Moreover, candidate-regions are sorted in importance descending order so that highly interested regions have priority to be detected. In Look-Into, candidate-regions of different scales are selected at first; then, Recurrent CNN is constructed and employed to deal with multiscale PolSAR subimages so that clearer and finer change detection results are generated. The process is repeated until all candidate-regions are detected. As a whole, the proposed algorithm based on the LAaI mode looks around whole images first to find out the possible position of changes (candidate-regions generation in Look-Around) and then reveal the exact shape of changes in different scales (multiscale change detection in Look-Into). The effect of APN and Recurrent CNN is verified in experiments, and it shows that the proposed method performs well in the task of change detection in the large-scope PolSAR image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the popularization of very high resolution polarimetric synthetic aperture radar image dataset, it is essential to re-investigate the classification scheme for 2-D land cases. The Touzi scattering vector model, a unique and roll-invariant decomposition solution, is employed to extract the scattering properties of different land covers. The parameters of Touzi decomposition act as input dataset for initial classification. A novel classifying algorithm is put forward by means of integrating the Touzi decomposition with conventional Wishart statistical models. Quantitative experiments are then conducted using uninhabited aerial vehicle synthetic aperture radar sample data for evaluating the performance of this new proposed approach. It can be concluded from the experimental results that the new proposed method is superior to the classical method in terms of producer accuracy, user accuracy, and overall accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compact-hybrid SAR (CP) is a dual-polarization (dual-pol) SAR mode that transmits a circular polarization (CirP) and measures the received signal at the horizontal and vertical antenna polarization. It is now admitted that the actual SAR technology does not permit the generation of a perfectly CirP and this may significantly affect CP radiometric and phase information. Since all the existing CP calibration models assume a perfectly transmitted CirP, there is an immediate need for the development of a new model that permits efficient assessment and calibration of CP non-circularity. In this article, a new general polarimetric hybrid SAR model (PolHyb) is introduced for both dual- (CP) and quad-polarization hybrid SAR modes. PolHyb explicitly includes the transmitted polarization non-circularity, in addition to conventional radar transmit and receive distortion matrices, channel imbalances and Faraday rotation contamination. The non-circularity of transmitted polarization is expressed in terms of the axial ratio (AR), which used to be popular in the 1960s for characterization of circularly polarized (transmit and receive) dual- and quad-polarization radar. The new CP model derived from PolHyb is adapted to PALSAR2-CP and used as the basis of an efficient method for an assessment of CP non-circularity using Amazonian rainforests. PALSAR2-CP data collected at four different beams (H2–6 to H2–9), with incidence angle varying between 30° and 45°, allows for the first ever demonstration of non-circularity of PALSAR2 CP transmitted polarization. Although it is lower than 0.5 dB for H2–6 and H2–7, the AR of PALSAR2-CP transmitted polarization increases significantly with incidence angle to reach up to 1 dB at Beam H2–8, and 2.3 dB at the highest incidence angles of Beam H2–9. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe the calculation of eigenvalues of $2 \times 2$ or $3 \times 3$ Hermitian matrices as used in the analysis of multilook polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. The eigenvalues are calculated as the roots of quadratic or cubic equations. We also describe the pivot-based calculation of the Loewner order for the partial ordering of differences between such matrices. The methods are well suited for fast matrix-oriented computer implementation, and the speed-up over simpler calculations based on built-in eigenproblem solvers is enormous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of hybrid-polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (hybrid-pol SAR) data can be carried out using two different types of analytical approaches. The first approach is by implementing direct-technique (DT), which directly takes hybrid-pol Stokes parameters as input. The second approach is reconstruction-based-technique (RBT), where the pseudo quad-polarimetric (quad-pol) data is reconstructed from the hybrid-pol measurements. Methods under DT and RBT categories have their own strengths and weaknesses, which are thoroughly investigated in this paper. Also, a comparative analysis of these methods is carried out on the basis of their ability for scattering type discrimination and land-cover classification using synthesized as well as true hybrid-pol data. Moreover, a new entropy (H)-based RBT approach is proposed in this paper which is being compared with the state-of-the-art techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advancement in remote sensing technology and microwave sensors explores the applications of remote sensing in different fields. Microwave remote sensing encompasses its benefits of providing cloud-free, all-weather images and images of day and night. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images own this capability which promoted the use of SAR and PolSAR images in land use/land cover classification and various other applications for different purposes. A review of different polarimetric decomposition techniques for classification of different regions is introduced in the paper. The general objective of the paper is to help researchers in identifying a deep learning technique appropriate for SAR or PolSAR image classification. The architecture of deep networks which ingest new ideas in the given area of research are also analysed in this paper. Benchmark datasets used in microwave remote sensing have been discussed and classification results of those data are analysed. Discussion on experimental results on one of the benchmark datasets is also provided in the paper. The paper discusses challenges, scope and opportunities in research of SAR/PolSAR images which will be helpful to researchers diving into this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]