Polarimetric scattering feature estimation for accurate vegetation area classification

This paper proposes an accuracy improvement of the vegetation area classification based on the POLSAR image analysis, when vegetation and man-made areas are both included in the radar target region. Here we introduce a simple compensate polarimetric marker, T₁₃ or T₃₁, to accurately distinguish the unexpected scattering from the obliquely oriented man-made targets and the complex volume scattering generated from vegetation area. T₁₃ or T₃₁ is the (1, 3) or (3, 1) elements of the 3×3 averaged coherency matrix ([T]), and has not been effectively utilized in the general scattering power decomposition scheme. By appropriately utilizing T₁₃ (T₃₁), one can extract only the vegetation area from the mixed target region. It is verified from the detailed analysis that the proposed marker T₁₃(T₃₁) works well not only for Pi-SAR data but also for ALOS/PALSAR data.