The cross-scattering component of polarimetric SAR in urban areas and its application to model-based scattering decomposition

After the work of Freeman, Durden, Pottier, and Yamaguchi, many decomposition techniques have been proposed for urban areas, mainly to resolve the overestimation problem of volume scattering. Since it has been validated that the cross-polarized (HV) scattering is caused not only by forests but also by rotated dihedrals, in this paper, we propose a cross-scattering coherency matrix to model the HV component from orientated and complex buildings and then demonstrate its performance on model-based scattering decomposition. The building orientation angle is considered in this coherency matrix, making it flexible and adaptive in the decomposition. Therefore, the HV components from forests and orientated urban areas can be modelled. Two decomposition procedures are applied in this paper. The first one is to validate the effectiveness of this scattering model. We regard the HV component from urban areas as cross-scattering, which is an independent scattering component added to the Yamaguchi’s four-component decomposition. Another one is the urban area decomposition application using this scattering model. Decomposition is implemented for urban and natural areas, and the HV component from urban areas is regarded as their volume scattering. This procedure is similar to many other state-of-the-art methods for urban areas and needs to discriminate the urban and natural areas before decomposition. Spaceborne Radarsat-2 C-band, the airborne synthetic aperture radar (AIRSAR) L-band, and uninhabited aerial vehicle synthetic aperture radar (UAVSAR) L-band full polarimetric SAR data are used to validate the performance of this cross-scattering coherency matrix. The HV component of orientated buildings is generated, leading to a better decomposition result for urban areas.