Polarimetric Target Detection on SAR Images

Abstract

Polarimetric radars sensors dealing with Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) techniques are of high usefulness for environmental ground truth measurement and validation and change monitoring of the terrestrial covers. PolSAR remote sensing techniques offer efficient and reliable means of collecting information required to extract biophysical and geophysical parameters about the earth s surface. They have found successful applications in crop monitoring, damage assessment, forestry, land use assessment, and also surveillance monitoring (oil spill detection, marine surveillance, etc.). It is clear that radar polarimetric techniques, with the use of a combination of more than one channel, help to detect target hidden in clutter, or to detect highly pure coherent radar target, as man-made objects like cars, tanks, ships. Moreover, the same type of clutter behaves in different ways with respect to the different polarimetric transmission schemes, making the process of clutter filtering more efficient and, enhancing the Signalto-Noise ratio, improving target detection against various types of clutter.This paper is derived from a study to demonstrate the benefit of applying polarimetric technology in defence scenarios, with particular attention to target classification, target information extraction, and detection of man-made object in vegetated environment.