A Comparison of Scattering Vector Parametrization Methods

In this paper, the characterization of different target scattering vector models for the physical scattering mechanism of a target is compared, focusing on the differences between our proposed target scattering vector model and other classical scattering vector models. The comparison will be in two parts, depending on the type of data in use. For the analysis of the physical scattering mechanism of single-look data, the α/β scattering vector model, the con-diagonalization scattering vector model developed by Touzi, and our proposed α
B
scattering vector model are compared for the effect of characterizing the physical scattering mechanism of the target, respectively. For the analysis of the physical scattering mechanism of multi-look data, the effects of H/α decomposition and our proposed ∆α
B
/α
B
decomposition on the classification of the target areas are compared, and the results are combined with the Wishart iterative classifier to optimize the classification results further. The experiments are performed on RADARSAR-2 (C-band) and ALOS-2 (L-band) data from San Francisco, USA. The results show that for single-look data, the α
B
scattering vector model is superior in overall performance. For multi-look data, the H/α and ∆α
B
/α
B
decompositions tend to misclassify volume and double scattering, respectively, and the ∆α
B
/α
B
may have better results than the H/α decomposition for the application of man-made targets dominated by double scattering.