Signal and Image Processing for Remote Sensing, 3rd Edition

8 Riemannian Clustering of PolSAR Data Using the Polar Decomposition

Madalina Ciuca, Gabriel Vasile, Marco Congedo, and Michel Gay

DOI: 10.1201/9781003382010-10

8.1 Introduction

Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data records the scattering diversity by measuring the electromagnetic response in two orthogonal polarization bases. The target decomposition algorithms are generally employed in the polarimetric signature analysis. They can be either coherent or incoherent. The distinction depends on whether the scattering or the covariance¹ matrices are used, respectively. While the first is a directly measured quantity for a full-polarimetric PolSAR pixel, the latter is a second-order statistical estimate.

One important application ...