Multi-resolution target scattering decomposition for urban feature characterization using polarimetric SARs

Urban areas include features (buildings) of coherent scattering as well as areas such as parks that manifest partially coherent scattering due to the significant natural variability in the scattering properties. While high- resolution coherent target decomposition(CTD) can be used for characterization of buildings, incoherent target scattering decomposition (ICTD) is more suitable for analysis of partially coherent targets [11]. In contrast to CTD, ICTD preserves the polarimetric information of the latter at the expanse of the requirement for use of coarse-resolution for unbiased estimation of ICTD parameters [9]. The Touzi decomposition [10], [15] permits a unified roll invariant decomposition of both coherent and partially coherent scattering. In this paper, a multi-resolution technique is introduced to adapt the Touzi decomposition to the coherence nature of target scattering. The multi- resolution mixture CTD-ICTD decomposition is validated using polarimetric Convair 580 SAR data collected over Ottawa city. Implications on the use of the new multi-resolution decomposition for the unified analysis of coherent and partially coherent target scattering are discussed.