A polarimetric temporal scene parameter and its application to change detection

The contribution of Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) images compared with the single-channel SAR in terms of temporal scene characterization has been found and described to add valuable information in the literature. In this paper, a new PolSAR change detector which makes use of Kullback-Leibler divergence is described. Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL-divergence) measures the amount of information in common between coherent temporal multi-channel polarimetric SAR acquisitions. Although in this paper KL-divergence measure has analytically been derived for temporal polarimetric SAR images based on complex Wishart process in time, since the mathematical formulation is general, it can be implemented into any kind of multivariate remote sensing data such as multi-spectral optical and interferometric images. KL-divergence measure is also simplified to give an explicit expressions for temporal single channel SAR images. The new results are simple, easy to be used, and superior in providing detailed structure.