Texture Classification of PolSAR Data Based on Sparse Coding of Wavelet Polarization Textons

This paper presents a frame for classifying polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data. The frame is based on the combination of wavelet polarization information, textons, and sparse coding. Polarimetric synthesis unites with the discrete wavelet frame to obtain wavelet polarization variance through the calculation of the wavelet variance in the space of polarization states. The K-means cluster algorithm is implemented to cluster the wavelet polarization variance vectors of the training samples for the purpose of constructing a texton dictionary. A patch, in which all the wavelet polarization variance vectors match those in the texton dictionary, is used to obtain a statistical histogram. Sparse coding is applied to describe the histogram feature and generate a new texture feature called sparse coding of a wavelet polarization texton. Finally, support vector machine is used for the classification. All experiments are carried out on five sets of PolSAR data. The experimental results confirm that the proposed method effectively classifies PolSAR data.