RATIO-BASED SIMILARITY CRITERIA FOR POLARIMETRIC SAR IMAGE

Abstract. Dealing with multi-look polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images requires averaging several independent looks to generate a sample covariance matrix of similar target scattering vectors. Along this, estimation of optimal similarity between target scattering vectors is still an open issue. In the literature, this intrinsic task has been mainly addressed in the information-based, geometric-based and detection-based frameworks. However, the derived measures mainly rely on the model assumption such as fully developed speckle and circular complex Gaussian distribution of the scattering vectors, which may not be held in high-resolution images of urban environments. To cope with this possible issue a discriminative model-free measure is proposed, where the similarity of target scattering is computed in the framework of non-local or patch based algorithm. In particular, the discriminative measure is constructed using the ratio between two pre-estimated covariance matrices of the scattering vectors. Experimental validation of the proposed measure is provided using ALOS-PALSAR image and compared with existing criterions in the literature.