Polarimetric scattering feature estimation for accurate vegetation area classification

This paper proposes an accuracy improvement of the vegetation area classification based on the POLSAR image analysis, when vegetation and man-made areas are both included in the radar target region. Here we introduce a simple compensate polarimetric marker, T13 or T31, to accurately distinguish the unexpected scattering from the obliquely oriented man-made targets and the complex volume scattering generated from vegetation area. T13 or T31 is the (1, 3) or (3, 1) elements of the 3×3 averaged coherency matrix ([T]), and has not been effectively utilized in the general scattering power decomposition scheme. By appropriately utilizing T13 (T31), one can extract only the vegetation area from the mixed target region. It is verified from the detailed analysis that the proposed marker T13(T31) works well not only for Pi-SAR data but also for ALOS/PALSAR data.