Analytic Expressions for Stochastic Distances Between Relaxed Complex Wishart Distributions

The scaled complex Wishart distribution is a widely used model for multilook full polarimetric SAR data whose adequacy has been attested in the literature. Classification, segmentation, and image analysis techniques which depend on this model have been devised, and many of them employ some type of dissimilarity measure. In this paper we derive analytic expressions for four stochastic distances between relaxed scaled complex Wishart distributions in their most general form and in important particular cases. Using these distances, inequalities are obtained which lead to new ways of deriving the Bartlett and revised Wishart distances. The expressiveness of the four analytic distances is assessed with respect to the variation of parameters. Such distances are then used for deriving new tests statistics, which are proved to have asymptotic chi-square distribution. Adopting the test size as a comparison criterion, a sensitivity study is performed by means of Monte Carlo experiments suggesting that the Bhattacharyya statistic outperforms all the others. The power of the tests is also assessed. Applications to actual data illustrate the discrimination and homogeneity identification capabilities of these distances.Comment: Accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing journa

Estimation of the Degree of Polarization for Hybrid/Compact and Linear Dual-Pol SAR Intensity Images: Principles and Applications

Analysis and comparison of linear and hybrid/compact dual-polarization (dual-pol) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery have gained a wholly new importance in the last few years, in particular, with the advent of new spaceborne SARs such as the Japanese ALOS PALSAR, the Canadian RADARSAT-2, and the German TerraSAR-X. Compact polarimetry, hybrid dual-pol, and quad-pol modes are newly promoted in the literature for future SAR missions. In this paper, we investigate and compare different hybrid/compact and linear dual-pol modes in terms of the estimation of the degree of polarization (DoP). The DoP has long been recognized as one of the most important parameters characterizing a partially polarized electromagnetic wave. It can be effectively used to characterize the information content of SAR data. We study and compare the information content of the intensity data provided by different hybrid/compact and linear dual-pol SAR modes. For this purpose, we derive the joint distribution of multilook SAR intensity images. We use this distribution to derive the maximum likelihood and moment-based estimators of the DoP in hybrid/compact and linear dual-pol modes.We evaluate and compare the performance of these estimators for different modes on both synthetic and real data, which are acquired by RADARSAT-2 spaceborne and NASA/JPL airborne SAR systems, over various terrain types such as urban, vegetation, and ocean