Fuzziness Modeling of Polarized Scattering Mechanisms and PolSAR Image Classification Using Fuzzy Triplet Discriminative Random Fields

Dominant scattering mechanism (DSM) obtained by Freeman decomposition is significant for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification. To preserve the purity of scattering characteristics, it restricts pixels in a scattering category to be classified with other pixels in the same scattering category. However, due to the speckle and the limited image resolution, it is difficult to obtain the DSMs of some pixels, which are defined as the fuzziness of polarized scattering mechanisms. Therefore, we first consider a particular-and pertinent-auxiliary field, and then propose the fuzzy triplet discriminative random fields (FTDF) model to describe the fuzziness of polarized scattering mechanisms, thus categorizing the scattering mechanisms into four classes: surface scattering, double-bounce scattering, volume scattering, and mixed scattering. The pixels in the first three categories are with specific DSMs, and the FTDF model introduces an exponential kernel distance to combine the multiple features of PolSAR data into classification. For the pixels in the mixed scattering, FTDF introduces a fuzzy clustering algorithm regularized by Kullback-Leibler information to consider the fuzzy DSMs, thus enhancing the classification. Then the fuzziness modeling of polarized scattering mechanisms can guide the classification of PolSAR images. The experimental results on real PolSAR images demonstrate the effectiveness of the FTDF model, and illustrate that it can improve the classification accuracy, and simultaneously preserve the purity of scattering mechanisms.