Fundamental Study on Man-Made Object Classification by Degree of Polarization Using PolSAR Data of Pi-SAR2-X

Recently, Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) has been attracting attention in the monitoring of the earth environment. The discrimination of man-made objects is one of the important issues in land classification among others. We have investigated discrimination performance of man-made objects by Degree of Polarization (DoP). DoP is a polarimetric parameter which shows the ratio of the polarized power to the total power. By using fully polarimetric data-set, we can evaluate the DoPs in arbitrary polarization basis both in transmitting and receiving. In this study, we used the PolSAR data acquired by Pi-SAR2-X, airborne SAR developed by NICT, Japan. The main interest in this study is to discriminate oriented urban area where the building blocks are inclined to the direction of radar illumination. Some DoP images of Pi-SAR2-X are shown in the presentation including urban area, oriented urban area and vegetation area, and sensitivities of DoP for various objects in different polarization bases.