Investigation of the Capability of $H\hbox {-}\alpha$ Decomposition of Compact Polarimetric SAR

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in compact polarimetry (CP), which helps to reduce the complexity, cost, mass, and data rate of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems while attempting to maintain many capabilities of a fully polarimetric system. In this letter, we provide a comparison of the capabilities of three conventional CP modes to distinguish different physical scattering mechanisms (PSMs) through H-α decomposition. A compact H-α space for dual circular polarimetric mode is proposed on the basis of the distribution centers and densities of different PSMs. Both airborne and spaceborne SAR data are used to validate our method. The experimental results show that the decomposition accuracy of each PSM is improved compared with the results of previous publication, the kappa coefficient increases by nearly 0.1, and the overall accuracy is above 81%.