Deorientation theory of polarimetric scattering targets and application to terrain surface classification

Deorientation theory of polarimetric scattering targets is presented. Using a transformation of the target scattering vector, the target orientation is turned to a certain fixed state and polarimetric scattering of the transformed scattering vector shows the prominence of the generic characteristics of the target. A new set of parameters u, v, w, ψ is defined based on a deorientation of the target scattering vector. Numerical simulation of polarimetric scattering of nonspherical particles illustrates the meanings of the parameters u, v, w, ψ and the entropy H. An unsupervised classification scheme of the terrain surfaces is developed, which classifies the terrain surfaces using the set of u., v, H, and analyzes the orientation distribution of each class based on deorientation angle ψ. As examples, a SIR-C polarimetric image over China´s Guangdong Hui-Yang district is classified into eight classes and a AirSAR polarimetric image over Canada´s Boreal district is orientation-analyzed using our approach of deorientation and four parameters u, v, ψ, and H.