Composite Sequential Network With POA Attention for PolSAR Image Analysis

The scattering response of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data is strongly target orientation-dependent. Formulating the polarimetric matrix as sequential data by rotating the polarimetric matrix along the radar line of sight would provide rich information about land-cover properties. In this work, we propose a composite sequential network (CSN) with polarization orientation angle (POA) attention to model the polarimetric coherency matrix sequence and explore target scattering orientation diversity features. Three major factors strengthen the proposed method for PolSAR image analysis. First, CSN improves the feature comprehensiveness by extending the interpretation mode of PolSAR data from spatial polarization to spatial polarization orientation. In this way, CSN could describe polarimetric response dynamics at different orientations. Second, a two-stream composite network with both real- and complex-valued convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) network is proposed to process the diagonal and off-diagonal elements of the coherency matrix sequence, respectively. Compared to existing real-/complex-valued networks, the CSN explores the significant phase information of the off-diagonal elements by operations in the complex domain. Meanwhile, CSN prevents padding 0 meaninglessly in the imaginary part of the real-valued diagonal elements. Third, during the sequential modeling of the polarimetric matrix, a POA attention mechanism is proposed. Equipped with POA-sensitive decomposition loss, the CSN attends to substantial POA range derived by targets’ physical scattering mechanism and learns features closely related to the scattering mechanism. Extensive experiments and analysis on land-cover classification demonstrate the proposed method’s robustness and excellence.