A General Implementation of the Neumann Volume Scattering Model for PolSAR Data

A general volume scattering model was proposed by Neumann et al. based on anisotropy and orientation randomness, which has been successfully applied to forest parameter retrieval from polarimetric interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SAR). A general implementation of the Neumann volume scattering model is designed for fully polarimetric SAR data, incorporating the contributions from the ground level consisting of surface scattering and double-bounce scattering. This combination helps to apply the Neumann volume scattering model to different vegetation scenarios. Based on this, a new parameter inversion framework is developed to estimate the anisotropy and the orientation randomness of the volumetric media, which are expected to be consistent with the ground truth. Meanwhile, the polarimetric information from the ground responses is extracted so that the interaction process between the SAR signals and the ground objects is fully explored. The L-band AIRSAR image covering Flevoland, The Netherlands was selected for the experiments. Compared with Neumann decomposition, the parameters estimated by the proposed method can more realistically reflect the canopy scattering characteristics. Moreover, the classification accuracy of crops is effectively improved by the feature parameters obtained by the proposed method.