Extraction of Particle and Orientation Distribution Characteristics from Polarimetric SAR Data

Abstract:
Radar polarimetry is sensitive to the shapes, sizes, orientations, and permittivities of a collection of scatterers. In this paper, studies are presented to retrieve these characteristics from real SAR data in order to discriminate and to classify different vegetation types. In the model, the particles are assumed to have narrow distributions of shapes, sizes and permittivities, leading to similar effective shapes. Under these assumptions, the distributions of zenith and azimuth angles are retrieved, together with the effective shape indicators. Experimental results are presented on simulated and real SAR data acquired by DLR’s ESAR sensor.