Potential of coherent decompositions in SAR polarimetry and interferometry

A comparative study has indicated that coherent decompositions may have high potential in applications using fully polarimetric and interferometric SAR data, as an alternative or supplement to standard non-coherent techniques developed during the last decade. One important reason for this seems to be that the coherent techniques are better able to benefit from the coherent nature of the underlying data and scattering mechanisms. By avoiding averaging at the first processing stage, the coherent techniques can extract target features that may otherwise be lost in the early averaging process. On the other hand, averaging is indeed important in most cases for obtaining stable and reliable end results.