Polarimetric features of PolSAR images include inherent scattering mechanisms of terrain types, which are important for classification and other Earth observation applications. By using target decomposition methods, many polarimetric scattering components can be obtained. Besides, the elements of a coherency/covariance matrix, as well as polarimetric descriptors, such as SPAN, single-bounce eigenvalue relative difference/double-bounce eigenvalue relative difference, etc., can also provide characteristic information. In fact, more and more polarimetric decomposition components and descriptors have been proposed; the computation cost increases if all of them are employed as the input of the classification process. Although all these features obtained from the coherency/covariance matrix are not independent, still, finding out which ones are significant for the classification of different terrain types will improve the understanding of scattering mechanisms. In this article, the effective polarimetric feature combination is studied based on the vegetation classification performance of support vector machine (SVM) and nearest-regularized subspace (NRS) machine learning approaches, as well as their combinations with a Markov random field (MRF). A framework on the basis of similarity and the orthogonal subspace projection (OSP) method in a hyperspectral area is used to select the polarimetric features. For the airborne PolSAR data in Flevoland, The Netherlands, 107 polarimetric features are extracted, including matrix elements, target decomposition components, and polarimetric descriptors. A subset is selected by using the proposed and OSP methods. They have a good classification accuracy evaluated by SVM+MRF and NRS+MRF classifiers. However, when the SVM and the NRS are used without combining spatial information of the MRF, the features selected by the proposed framework with correlation coefficient criteria have much better classification performance than those of OSP and principal component analysis.

Feature extraction using polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images is of great interest in SAR classification, no matter if it is applied in an unsupervised approach or a supervised approach. In the supervised classification framework, a major group of methods is based on machine learning. Various machine learning methods have been investigated for PolSAR image classification, including neural network (NN), support vector machine (SVM), and so on. Recently, representation-based classifications have gained increasing attention in hyperspectral imagery, such as the newly-proposed sparse-representation classification (SRC) and nearest-regularized subspace (NRS). These classifiers provide excellent performance that is comparable to or even better than the classic SVM for remotely-sensed image processing. However, rare studies have been found to extend this representation-based NRS classification into PolSAR images. By the use of the NRS approach, a polarimetric feature vector-based PolSAR image classification method is proposed in this paper. The polarimetric SAR feature vector is constructed by the components of different target decomposition algorithms for each pixel, including those scattering components of Freeman, Huynen, Krogager, Yamaguchi decomposition, as well as the eigenvalues, eigenvectors and their consequential parameters such as entropy, anisotropy and mean scattering angle. Furthermore, because all these representation-based methods were originally designed to be pixel-wise classifiers, which only consider the separate pixel signature while ignoring the spatial-contextual information, the Markov random field (MRF) model is also introduced in our scheme. MRF can provide a basis for modeling contextual constraints. Two AIRSAR data in the Flevoland area are used to validate the proposed classification scheme. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can reach an accuracy of around $99\%$ for both AIRSAR data by randomly selecting 300 pixels of each class as the training samples. Under the condition that the training data ratio is more than $4\%$ , it has better performance than the SVM, SVM-MRF and NRS methods.

Sparsity-driven synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging technique for frequency modulation continuous-wave (FMCW) has already shown the superiority in terms of performance improvement in imaging and recovery from down-sampled data. However, restricted by the computational cost, conventional FMCW SAR sparse imaging method based on observation matrix is not able to achieve the large-scale scene reconstruction, not to mention real-time processing. To solve this problem, the FMCW SAR sparse imaging theory based on approximated observation is proposed by using an echo simulation operator to replace typical observation matrix, and recovering the scene via two-dimensional (2-D) regularization operation. This new technology can achieve high-resolution sparse imaging of the scene with a computational cost close to that of traditional matched filtering (MF) algorithms, which makes several applications, such as early-warning and battlefield monitoring, possible by using FMCW SAR sparse imaging system. In this paper, we present the recent research progress on approximated observation based FMCW SAR sparse imaging to deal with a few key issues for practical radar systems. In particular, we describe 1) Lq-norm regularization based imaging technique that makes sparse reconstruction of large-scale scene possible; 2) L2,q-norm regularization based imaging technique that minimizes the azimuth ambiguities in high-resolution sparse imaging; 3) a sparse imaging technique that supports real-time applications of FMCW SAR imaging.

With global warming, supraglacial lakes play an important role in ice sheet stability and climate change. They are not only the main factors affecting mass balance and sea-level rise but also the key units of surface runoff storage and mass loss. To automatically map the spatiotemporal distribution of supraglacial lakes in Greenland, this paper proposes an attention-based U-Net model with Sentinel-1 SAR imagery. The extraction results show that compared with the traditional network, this method obtains a higher validation coefficient, with an F1 score of 0.971, and it is spatiotemporally transferable, able to realize the extraction of supraglacial lakes in complex areas without ignoring small lakes. In addition, we conducted a case study in the Jakobshavn region and found that the supraglacial lake area peaked in advance between spring and summer due to extreme melting events from 2017 to 2021. Meanwhile, the supraglacial lakes near the 79°N Glacier tended to expand inland during the melting season.

Digital elevation model (DEM) generation using multi-aspect synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery applying radargrammetry has become a hotspot. The traditional radargrammetric method is to solve the rigorous radar projection equations to obtain the three dimensional coordinates of targets. In this paper, we propose a new DEM generation method based on the offset between multi-aspect images formed on ground plane. The ground object will be projected to different positions from different viewing aspect angles if the height of object is not equal to the height of imaging plane. The linear relationship between the offset of imaging positions and height of the object is derived and scale factor is obtained finally. Height information can be retrieved from offset of imaging positions directly through the DEM extraction model presented in this paper. Thus the solution to nonlinear equations point by point can be avoided. Real C band airborne circular SAR images is used to verify the proposed approach. When extracted DEM applied in multi-aspect imaging process, superimposition of multi-aspect images will no longer be defocusing and can achieve finer observation of the scanned scene.

In this paper, a new moving target detection algorithm for single channel circular Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is presented. Circular SAR can perform observation with circular trajectory and retrieve multiaspect information. Due to the circular trajectory, the moving target has long and complex apparent trace (smear trajectory), while the background (clutter) has relatively slow changing characteristic in limited azimuth integration. Thus, the background image can be filtered by using radiometric adjusted overlap subaperture images. Then, the Signal-to-Clutter Ratio (SCR) of the region where the strong backscattering clutter exists is enhanced with logarithm background subtraction technique. In the real data experiment, the maximum SCR improvement is 13 dB. Finally, the moving target can be detected using a Constant False Alarm (CFAR) detector. The algorithm is evaluated with one channel data of three channel GOTCHA-GMTI dataset.