Study on Characteristics of Polarimetric Interferometric SAR Data in Rotation Domain

Abstract

Deriving characteristic parameters is very important to the accurate interpretation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image and the application of land cover classification. In this paper, we apply the uniform polarimetric matrix rotation theory to the polarimetric interferometric SAR (PolInSAR) data and deduce the parameter set of the polarimetric interferometric coherency matrix in rotation domain. The relationship between the characteristics of the parameter set and the terrain is also analyzed. Finally, we propose a land cover classification scheme using parameters in rotation domain and apply it to measured PolInSAR data. The classification result is better than using the parameters in rotation domain of polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) data and confirm that the polarimetric interferometric coherency matrix parameters in rotation domain can be used for land cover classification.