Four-Component Scattering Power Decomposition With Extended Volume Scattering Model

In the three- or four-component decompositions, polarimetric scattering properties and corresponding physical scattering models play essential roles for power decomposition. This letter proposes an improved four-component scattering power decomposition method that employs a suitable volume scattering model for single- or double-bounce scattering in the polarimetric synthetic aperture radar image analysis. The cross-polarized HV component is created by both single-bounce object (such as vegetation) and double-bounce structures (such as oriented building blocks). It has been difficult to discriminate these two objects (vegetation against oriented buildings) in the decomposed images since the HV component is assigned to the volume scattering due to vegetation only. We propose to extend the volume scattering model suited for two physical scattering models. It is shown that a vegetation area and an oriented urban building area are well discriminated compared to those resulting from the implementation of the existing four-component scattering power decomposition.