Quantification of degree-of-order in urban area from full-polarimetric SAR observation

It is known that orientation angle of man-made objects such as aligned buildings can be estimated from an argument value of complex correlation coefficient of circularly polarized synthetic aperture radar(SAR) measurement bases. By making use of such feature, degree-of-order in urban area is defined quantitatively as dispersion of the argument which is called polarization angle(PA) derived from full-polarimetric SAR measurements. We estimated the degree-of-order from PALSAR and PiSAR2 full-polarimetric measurements at several areas including natural vegetation or tree area and aligned building filled one. To derive dispersion of argument data, we adopted `unit vector sum´ method to avoid ambiguity effect of angle data. The dispersions at natural vegetation areas are larger than those at orderly aligned building areas. Then proposed dispersion is regarded as quantitative degree-of-order measure.