Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification is an important application. Advanced deep learning techniques represented by deep convolutional neural network (CNN) have been utilized to enhance the classification performance. One current challenge is how to adapt deep CNN classifier for PolSAR classification with limited training samples, while keeping good generalization performance. This letter attempts to contribute to this problem. The core idea is to incorporate expert knowledge of target scattering mechanism interpretation and polarimetric feature mining to assist deep CNN classifier training and improve the final classification performance. A polarimetric-feature-driven deep CNN classification scheme is established. Both classical roll-invariant polarimetric features and hidden polarimetric features in the rotation domain are used to drive the proposed deep CNN model. Comparison studies validate the efficiency and superiority of the proposal. For the benchmark AIRSAR data, the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art classification accuracy. Meanwhile, the convergence speed from the proposed polarimetric-feature-driven CNN approach is about 2.3 times faster than the normal CNN method. For multitemporal UAVSAR data sets, the proposed scheme achieves comparably high classification accuracy as the normal CNN method for train-used temporal data, while for train-not-used data it obtains an average of 4.86% higher overall accuracy than the normal CNN method. Furthermore, the proposed strategy can also produce very promising classification accuracy even with very limited training samples.

Ship detection is one of important applications for synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Speckle effects usually make SAR image understanding difficult and speckle reduction becomes a necessary pre-processing step for majority SAR applications. This work examines different speckle reduction methods on SAR ship detection performances. It is found out that the influences of different speckle filters are significant which can be positive or negative. However, how to select a suitable combination of speckle filters and ship detectors is lack of theoretical basis and is also data-orientated. To overcome this limitation, a speckle-free SAR ship detection approach is proposed. A similar pixel number (SPN) indicator which can effectively identify salient target is derived, during the similar pixel selection procedure with the context covariance matrix (CCM) similarity test. The underlying principle lies in that ship and sea clutter candidates show different properties of homogeneity within a moving window and the SPN indicator can clearly reflect their differences. The sensitivity and efficiency of the SPN indicator is examined and demonstrated. Then, a speckle-free SAR ship detection approach is established based on the SPN indicator. The detection flowchart is also given. Experimental and comparison studies are carried out with three kinds of spaceborne SAR datasets in terms of different polarizations. The proposed method achieves the best SAR ship detection performances with the highest figures of merits (FoM) of 97.14%, 90.32% and 93.75% for the used Radarsat-2, GaoFen-3 and Sentinel-1 datasets, accordingly.

Polarimetric coherence, which has the potential to reveal physical properties of scatterers, is an important source for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data investigation. Target structure and orientation relative to the PolSAR illumination direction are key factors affecting the polarimetric coherence degree. The relative orientation between a sensor and a target can be adjusted using the rotating processing along the radar's line of sight. The main idea of this paper is to extend the traditional polarimetric coherence at a given rotation state (θ = 0) to the rotation domain (θ ∈ [-π,π)) along the radar's line of sight for hidden information exploration. A visualization and characterization tool named as a polarimetric coherence pattern for two arbitrary polarization channels is proposed and developed. This interpretation tool is able to view the variation of polarimetric coherence in the rotation domain containing rich orientation diversity information which is seldom considered. A set of characterization features are derived to completely describe a polarimetric coherence pattern thereafter. Experimental studies with unmanned aerial vehicle SAR (UAVSAR) PolSAR data over crop areas have validated that polarimetric coherence patterns vary in terms of polarization combinations and crop types. The proposed characterization features show good potential to differentiate polarimetric responses from different land covers. Furthermore, a classification scheme combining the selected proposed features and the commonly used roll-invariant features is developed for quantitative and application investigation. Comparison studies with both UAVSAR and Airborne SAR (AIRSAR) data clearly demonstrate the superiority of the proposed classification to the conventional classification with only roll-invariant features. The overall classification accuracies for the seven and eleven land covers of UAVSAR and AIRSAR data are, respectively, increased from 90.21% and 93.87% to 95.12% and 94.63% by the proposed classification scheme. This paper also demonstrates the importance of and potential for utilizing the complementary advantages of roll-invariant features and the proposed roll-variant features.

Ship monitoring is an important application of synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The constant false alarm rate (CFAR) methods are commonly used for ship detection. However, CFAR detectors usually face challenges for inshore dense ship detection. Due to the significant mixture of ship candidates and sea clutters within the clutter window, the detection threshold may be overestimated leading to many missed detections. To mitigate this issue, a superpixel-level CFAR detector is proposed. The main contribution contains two aspects. First, a labeling procedure is established for pure clutter superpixels and mixture superpixels discrimination in terms of unsupervised clustering. Second, a nonlocal topology strategy is proposed to adaptively determine a sufficient number of pure clutter superpixels for detection threshold estimation. In this vein, an adaptive superpixel-level CFAR approach is constructed and validated with Radarsat-2, Sentinel-1, and AIRSARShip-1 data sets. Comparison studies demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. Compared with a traditional CFAR detector and two recent superpixel methods, the proposed method achieves clearly better performance for inshore dense ship regions.

Speckle filtering of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image is a necessary pre-processing for many subsequent applications. The challenge lies in how to adaptively select a sufficient number of similar pixels for an unbiased estimator generation. A novel SAR speckle filter is proposed and the core idea contains two aspects. Firstly, a context covariance matrix representation is developed within a local neighborhood to characterize the contexture information. Then, the Wishart statistic test is extended to examine the similarity of context covariance matrices. The extended similarity test indicator derived from context covariance matrices is verified to be sensitive for similar pixel localization. Thereafter, a sample averaging estimator is adopted based on the similar samples determined by the context covariance matrices similarity test (the proposed method is named as the CCM+SimiTest). Furthermore, a fast similarity test computation scheme is established which can handle large images smoothly even with a normal laptop. Intensive experimental studies with Radarsat-2, MiniSAR and ALOS-2 datasets are carried out. Comparisons with several state-of-the-art methods from both subjective and objective viewpoints demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.

Land cover classification is an important application for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR). Target polarimetric response is strongly dependent on its orientation. Backscattering responses of the same target with different orientations to the SAR flight path may be quite different. This target orientation diversity effect hinders PolSAR image understanding and interpretation. Roll-invariant polarimetric features such as entropy, anisotropy, mean alpha angle, and total scattering power are independent of the target orientation and are commonly adopted for PolSAR image classification. On the other aspect, target orientation diversity also contains rich information which may not be sensed by roll-invariant polarimetric features. In this vein, only using the roll-invariant polarimetric features may limit the final classification accuracy. To address this problem, this work uses the recently reported uniform polarimetric matrix rotation theory and a visualization and characterization tool of polarimetric coherence pattern to investigate hidden polarimetric features in the rotation domain along the radar line of sight. Then, a feature selection scheme is established and a set of hidden polarimetric features are selected in the rotation domain. Finally, a classification method is developed using the complementary information between roll-invariant and selected hidden polarimetric features with a support vector machine (SVM)/decision tree (DT) classifier. Comparison experiments are carried out with NASA/JPL AIRSAR and multi-temporal UAVSAR data. For AIRSAR data, the overall classification accuracy of the proposed classification method is 95.37% (with SVM)/96.38% (with DT), while that of the conventional classification method is 93.87% (with SVM)/94.12% (with DT), respectively. Meanwhile, for multi-temporal UAVSAR data, the mean overall classification accuracy of the proposed method is up to 97.47% (with SVM)/99.39% (with DT), which is also higher than the mean accuracy of 89.59% (with SVM)/97.55% (with DT) from the conventional method. The comparison studies clearly demonstrate the efficiency and advantage of the proposed classification methodology. In addition, the proposed classification method achieves better robustness for the multi-temporal PolSAR data. This work also further validates that added benefits can be gained for PolSAR data investigation by mining and utilization of hidden polarimetric information in the rotation domain.