Coherent polarimetric SAR change analysis

Abstract

We have developed a general framework to assess coherent polarimetric change that applies equally to quad-pol, dual-pol and hybrid-pol imagery. The formalism permits estimating polarimetric coherence for any combination of transmitted and received polarizations. In particular, the polarizations can be tuned to match specific targets of interest, or conversely, to determine the scattering properties of the changed targets. We will complete the investigation of both likelihood-ratio test statistics and illustrate our results using RadarSAR-2 and PALSAR polarimetric data. Our results will also be compared to those from previous works.