A validation of ICA decomposition for PolSAR images by using measures of normalized compression distance

Simple color, intensity representations of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images fail to show the physical characteristics of the recorded ground objects, so several coherent and incoherent decomposition theorems have been proposed in the state-of-the-art literature. All these decompositions assume the fact that any scattering mechanism can be represented as the sum of some simpler, canonical" scattering mechanisms. Following the same assumption, in this paper we employ the independent component analysis (ICA) for PolSAR images representation. Since ICA is a method used for blind sources separation, we expect that the derived ICA channels represent as well as possible certain types of scattering mechanisms present in the image. ICA decomposition is validated against the coherent Pauli and the incoherent H/a/α decompositions. The normalized compression distance (NCD) is used as a measure of quality of decompositions. Experiments are made on a SLC L-band F-SAR image over Kaufbeuren airfield, Germany.