An Improvement on the Complete Model-Based Decomposition of Polarimetric SAR Data

An improvement on the complete three-component model-based decomposition (C3MD) of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is proposed in this letter. When analyzing the scattering mechanism of the third component in the original C3MD, an orientation angle rotation (OAR) is used. However, the deorientation is found more suitable to be applied to analyze the scattering mechanism of the third component, because the deorientation minimizes the cross-polarization power of a coherency matrix so as to make the coherency matrix much closer to that of surface scattering or double-bounce scattering. With applying the deorientation instead of the OAR used in the original C3MD, an improved C3MD algorithm is proposed. Experiments with E-SAR data are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the improvement.