A preliminary study of target contour extraction based on scattering mechanism using polarimetric SAR images

Finding the target contour information from a remote sensing image is one of the fundamental steps for image analysis. Conventional target contour extraction methods are usually based on the statistics information of the image. In this paper, using the maximum return value of the normalized scattering matrix derived from full-polarized Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR), the relationship between the contour of targets and their corresponding dominate scattering type is preliminary researched. Then a novel target contour information extraction method based on the physical scattering mechanism of terrain targets is proposed, which is more effective and adaptable due to the scattering mechanism of terrain targets do not depend on the radar backscattering intensity, but its proportion among different polarizations. After applying to E-SAR airborne data, the results show that this method has a good capability to extract the target contour information.