Polarimetric SAR Image Factorization

This paper reformulates the problem of polarimetric incoherent target decomposition as a general image factorization which aims to simultaneously estimate a dictionary of meaningful atom scatterers and their corresponding spatial distribution maps. Both model-based and eigenanalysis-based decompositions can be seen as special cases of image factorization under specific constraints. The inverse problem of image factorization can be converted to an equivalent nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) problem via redundant coding. It enables a wide range of NMF algorithms with various regularizations to be directly applicable to polarimetric image analysis. The advantage of the proposed image factorization is demonstrated on both synthesized and real data. It also shows that extended applications such as speckle reduction and classification can benefit from the proposed image factorization.