Deep learning methods have been widely studied for Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) land cover classification. The scarcity of PolSAR labeled samples and the small receptive field of the model limit the performance of deep learning methods for land cover classification. In this paper, a vision Transformer (ViT)-based classification method is proposed. The ViT structure can extract features from the global range of images based on a self-attention block. The powerful feature representation capability of the model is equivalent to a flexible receptive field, which is suitable for PolSAR image classification at different resolutions. In addition, because of the lack of labeled data, the Mask Autoencoder method is used to pre-train the proposed model with unlabeled data. Experiments are carried out on the Flevoland dataset acquired by NASA/JPL AIRSAR and the Hainan dataset acquired by the Aerial Remote Sensing System of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The experimental results on both datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.

Forests cover approximately one-third of the Earth’s land surface and constitute the core region of the carbon cycle on Earth. The paramount importance and multi-purpose applications of forest monitoring have gained widespread recognition over recent decades. Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar interferometry (PolInSAR) has been demonstrated as a promising technique to retrieve the forest height over large areas with a limited cost. This paper presents an overview of forest height inversion (FHI) techniques based on PolInSAR data. Firstly, we introduce the basic theories of PolInSAR and FHI procedures. Next, we review the established data-based algorithms for single-baseline data and describe innovative techniques related to multi-baseline data. Then, the model-based algorithms are also introduced with their corresponding forest scattering models under multiple data acquisition modes. Subsequently, a case study is presented to demonstrate the applicable scenarios and advantages of different algorithms. Model-based algorithms can provide accurate results when the scene and forest properties are well understood and the model assumptions are valid. Data-based algorithms, on the other hand, can handle complex scattering scenarios and are generally more robust to uncertainties in the input parameters. Finally, the prospect of forest height inversion was analyzed. It is our hope that this review will provide guidelines to future researchers to enhance further FHI algorithmic developments.

Vegetation height estimation plays a pivotal role in forest mapping, which significantly promotes the study of environment and climate. This paper develops a general forest structure model for vegetation height estimation using polarimetric interferometric synthetic aperture radar (PolInSAR) data. In simple terms, the temporal decorrelation factor of the random volume over ground model with volumetric temporal decorrelation (RVoG-vtd) is first modeled by random motions of forest scatterers to solve the problem of ambiguity. Then, a novel four-stage algorithm is proposed to improve accuracy in forest height estimation. In particular, to compensate for the temporal decorrelation mainly caused by changes between multiple observations, one procedure of temporal decorrelation adaptive estimation via Expectation-Maximum (EM) algorithm is added into the novel method. On the other hand, to extract the features of amplitude and phase more effectively, in the proposed method, we also convert Euclidean distance to a generalized distance for the first time. Assessments of different algorithms are given based on the repeat-pass PolInSAR data of Gabon Lope Park acquired in AfriSAR campaign of German Aerospace Center (DLR). The experimental results show that the proposed method presents a significant improvement of vegetation height estimation accuracy with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 6.23 m and a bias of 1.28 m against LiDAR heights, compared to the results of the three-stage method (RMSE: 8.69 m, bias: 4.81 m) and the previous four-stage method (RMSE: 7.72 m, bias: −2.87 m).

Ship detection with polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) has received increasing attention for its wide usage in maritime applications. However, extracting discriminative features to implement ship detection is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel ship detection method for PolSAR images via task-driven discriminative dictionary learning (TDDDL). An assumption that ship and clutter information are sparsely coded under two separate dictionaries is made. Contextual information is considered by imposing superpixel-level joint sparsity constraints. In order to amplify the discrimination of the ship and clutter, we impose incoherence constraints between the two sub-dictionaries in the objective of feature coding. The discriminative dictionary is trained jointly with a linear classifier in task-driven dictionary learning (TDDL) framework. Based on the learnt dictionary and classifier, we extract discriminative features by sparse coding, and obtain robust detection results through binary classification. Different from previous methods, our ship detection cue is obtained through active learning strategies rather than artificially designed rules, and thus, is more adaptive, effective and robust. Experiments performed on synthetic images and two RADARSAT-2 images demonstrate that our method outperforms other comparative methods. In addition, the proposed method yields better shape-preserving ability and lower computation cost.