Three-component decomposition for polarimetric SAR

An improved three-component decomposition for polarimetric SAR data is proposed in this paper. The reasons of the emergence of negative powers in the Freeman decomposition have been analyzed, and two improvements are included. Firstly, the deorientation process is applied to the coherency matrix before it is decomposed into three scattering components. Then, the coherency matrix with the maximal polarimetric entropy, i.e, the unit matrix is used as the new volume scattering model instead of the original one adopted in the Freeman decomposition. The E-SAR polarimetric data acquired over the Oberpfaffenhofen area in Germany are applied for experiment to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new model.