Polarimetric Decomposition-Based Unified Manmade Target Scattering Characterization With Mathematical Programming Strategies

Due to the orientation variation and structural complexity, designing generalized and unified features to highlight manmade target scattering from polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data is challenging. Inspired by the thought of mathematical programming (MP) and coupled with the model-based decomposition, this article proposes two polarimetric features: scattering contribution combiner (SCC) and scattering contribution angle (SCA) for unified scattering characterization of manmade targets. To this end, a rotated dihedral scattering model is first constructed concerning the analogous difference reciprocal and sigmoid function transformations, which adequately reflects the transition of co- and cross-pol responses caused by the orientation variation. Along with the dipole-like compound scattering models and through designing a discriminant-based model solution method, a fine eight-component decomposition using full polarimetric information is proposed. Through skillfully employing the MP strategies, the proposed decomposition achieves the physical optimization of scattering modeling and reasonable inversion of model parameters. Thus, it can accurately describe the local structure scattering and remarkably improve the overestimation of volume scattering. Subsequently, by analyzing the significance distribution on targets of different scattering mechanisms, the SCC is constructed via the linear/nonlinear combination of scattering contributions on the one hand. On the other hand, by further mining the information implied in the scattering contributions, the SCA is proposed with the strategy of trigonometric function transformation. Experimental results conducted on real PolSAR data not only demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the constructed features but also exhibit a clear advantage of fine polarimetric decomposition in scattering understanding, which encourages the use of them for further applications.