Polarimetric Radar Imaging: From Basics to Applications »

The recent launches of three fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) satellites have shown that polarimetric radar imaging can provide abundant data on the Earth’s environment, such as biomass and forest height estimation, snow cover mapping, glacier monitoring, and damage assessment. Written by two of the most recognized leaders in this field, Polarimetric Radar Imaging: From Basics to Applications presents polarimetric radar imaging and processing techniques and shows how to develop remote sensing applications using PolSAR imaging radar.

The book provides a substantial and balanced introduction to the basic theory and advanced concepts of polarimetric scattering mechanisms, speckle statistics and speckle filtering, polarimetric information analysis and extraction techniques, and applications typical to radar polarimetric remote sensing. It explains the importance of wave polarization theory and the speckle phenomenon in the information retrieval problem of microwave imaging and inverse scattering. The authors demonstrate how to devise intelligent information extraction algorithms for remote sensing applications. They also describe more advanced polarimetric analysis techniques for polarimetric target decompositions, polarization orientation effects, polarimetric scattering modeling, speckle filtering, terrain and forest classification, manmade target analysis, and PolSAR interferometry.

With sample PolSAR data sets and software available for download, this self-contained, hands-on book encourages you to analyze space-borne and airborne PolSAR and polarimetric interferometric SAR (Pol-InSAR) data and then develop applications using this data.

Ch. 1 Overview of Polarimetric Radar Imaging 1

Ch. 2 Electromagnetic Vector Wave and Polarization Descriptors 31

Ch. 3 Electromagnetic Vector Scattering Operators 53

Ch. 4 Polarimetric SAR Speckle Statistics 101

Ch. 5 Polarimetric SAR Speckle Filtering 143

Ch. 6 Introduction to the Polarimetric Target Decomposition Concept 179

Ch. 7 The H/A/a Polarimetric Decomposition Theorem 229

Ch. 8 PolSAR Terrain and Land-Use Classification 265

Ch. 9 Pol-InSAR Forest Mapping and Classification 301

Ch. 10 Selected Polarimetric SAR Applications 323

App. A Eigen Characteristics of Hermitian Matrix 379

App. B PolSARpro Software: The Polariemtric SAR Data Processing and Educational Toolbox 385

Index 391