A novel deorientation method in PolSAR data processing

摘要: Deorientation plays an important role in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) target decomposition, terrain classification, and geophysical parameters retrieval. The existing deorientation method roughly rotates the target by an average/mixed orientation angle (OA) about the line of radar sight. However, regarding the complex high-entropy mixed scatterer, which usually comprises several comparable sub-scatterers with different OAs, the average/mixed OA is obviously insufficient to account for the diverse OAs’ reality. To address this, a novel PolSAR data deorientation method is proposed in this letter. The proposed method deorients a mixed scatterer by reconstructing the underlying sub-scatterers using the eigenvalue-based Cloude–Pottier decomposition first, and then compensates the OA of each reconstructed sub-scatterer using Huynen’s desying operation, respectively. One important feature of the proposed method is that it is consistent with Huynen’s desying operation that the real part of the (1, 3) element of the deoriented coherency matrix should be zero. The proposed method provides a fine deorientation for mixed targets, and is especially suitable for the extraction of oriented urban regions. Comparative experiments with the existing method on RADARSAT-2 PolSAR data demonstrate the excellent deorientation performance of the proposed method. © 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.