Fast Alternatives to $H/\alpha$ for Polarimetric SAR

The polarimetric entropy (H) and the alpha angle (α) are two important parameters for analyzing polarimetric synthetic aperture radar data. However, for some special cases, the unstableness of the alpha angle is found; in addition, time consumption for extracting both the parameters will become quite tedious for very large images by pixelwise eigendecomposition. To overcome these shortcomings, a fast algorithm to calculate the polarimetric entropy and two new parameters are proposed in this paper. The first parameter has similar properties to the alpha angle but is stable; the second also behaves similar to the polarimetric entropy. More importantly, both new parameters can be derived very quickly. Like the unsupervised H α classification, the image can also be classified based on the two new parameters. The NASA/JPL AIRSAR L-band data of San Francisco are applied in the experiment.