In this paper, two mixture models are proposed for modeling heterogeneous regions in single-look and multi-look polarimetric SAR images, along with their corresponding maximum likelihood classifiers for land cover classification. The classical Gaussian and Wishart models are suitable for modeling scattering vectors and covariance matrices from homogeneous regions, while their performance deteriorates for regions that are heterogeneous. By comparison, the proposed mixture models reduce the modeling error by expressing the data distribution as a weighted sum of multiple component distributions. For single-look and multi-look polarimetric SAR data, complex Gaussian and complex Wishart components are adopted, respectively. Model parameters are determined by employing the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Two maximum likelihood classifiers are then constructed based on the proposed mixture models. These classifiers are assessed using polarimetric SAR images from the RADARSAT-2 sensor of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), the AIRSAR sensor of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the EMISAR sensor of the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Experiment results demonstrate that the new models fit heterogeneous regions preferably to the classical models and are especially appropriate for extremely heterogeneous regions, such as urban areas. The overall accuracy of land cover classification is also improved due to the more refined modeling.

Normally, polarimetric SAR classification is a high-dimensional nonlinear mapping problem. In the realm of pattern recognition, sparse representation is a very efficacious and powerful approach. As classical descriptors of polarimetric SAR, covariance and coherency matrices are Hermitian semidefinite and form a Riemannian manifold. Conventional Euclidean metrics are not suitable for a Riemannian manifold, and hence, normal sparse representation classification cannot be applied to polarimetric SAR directly. This paper proposes a new land cover classification approach for polarimetric SAR. There are two principal novelties in this paper. First, a Stein kernel on a Riemannian manifold instead of Euclidean metrics, combined with sparse representation, is employed for polarimetric SAR land cover classification. This approach is named Stein-sparse representation-based classification (SRC). Second, using simultaneous sparse representation and reasonable assumptions of the correlation of representation among different frequency bands, Stein-SRC is generalized to simultaneous Stein-SRC for multi-frequency polarimetric SAR classification. These classifiers are assessed using polarimetric SAR images from the Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (AIRSAR) sensor of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Electromagnetics Institute Synthetic Aperture Radar (EMISAR) sensor of the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Experiments on single-band and multi-band data both show that these approaches acquire more accurate classification results in comparison to many conventional and advanced classifiers.

One key problem for the classification of multi-frequency polarimetric SAR images is to extract target features simultaneously in the aspects of frequency, polarization and spatial texture. This paper proposes a new classification method for multi-frequency polarimetric SAR data based on tensor representation and multi-linear subspace learning (MLS). Firstly, each cell of the SAR images is represented by a third-order tensor in the frequency, polarization and spatial domains, with each order of tensor corresponding to one domain. Then, two main MLS methods, i.e., multi-linear principal component analysis (MPCA) and multi-linear extension of linear discriminant analysis (MLDA), are used to learn the third-order tensors. MPCA is used to analyze the principal component of the tensors. MLDA is applied to improve the discrimination between different land covers. Finally, the lower dimension subtensor features extracted by the MPCA and MLDA algorithms are classified with a neural network (NN) classifier. The classification scheme is accessed using multi-band polarimetric SAR images (C-, L- and P-band) acquired by the Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (AIRSAR) sensor of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) over the Flevoland area. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has good classification performance in comparison with the classic multi-band Wishart classifier. The overall classification accuracy is close to 99%, even when the number of training samples is small.