Independent Component Analysis Based Incoherent Target Decompositions for Polarimetric SAR Data ‐ Practical Aspects

The Independent Component Analysis (ICA) has been recently introduced as a reliable alternative to identify canonical scattering mechanisms within PolSAR images. This paper addresses an important practical aspect for applying such methods on real data, namely speckle filtering with ICA. A novel algorithm is introduced by adjusting the Lee's sigma filter to the particular nature of the Touzi's polarimetric decomposition. In its current form, it allows the use of the ICA mixing matrix in the derived speckle filter.