High-voltage transmission towers detection using hybrid polarimetric SAR data

In the past decade, the compact/hybrid polarimetric SAR systems have been proposed and investigated, their potentials in remote sensing applications have been gradually accepted. The main object of this paper is to investigate the capability of hybrid polarimetric SAR data to detect objects with vertical structure, and in this paper, the high-voltage transmission towers detection is taken as an example. Two important parameters defined in hybrid mode, namely the linear polarization ratio (μ_L) and the degree of linear polarization P_L, are analyzed. μ_L is found to behave similarly to the HH/VV ratio, which has been widely used in detecting objects with vertical structure, such as rice and wheat. P_L is also found to be useful in high-voltage transmission towers detection in our experiments. The AirSAR data acquired over Flevoland are used in our experiments and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of μ_L and P_L.