USING COVARIANCE MATRIX FOR CHANGE DETECTION OF POLARIMETRIC SAR DATA

Abstract. Nowadays change detection is an important role in civil and military fields. The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images due to its independent of atmospheric conditions and cloud cover, have attracted much attention in the change detection applications. When the SAR data are used, one of the appropriate ways to display the backscattered signal is using covariance matrix that follows the Wishart distribution. Based on this distribution a statistical test for equality of two complex variance-covariance matrices can be used. In this study, two full polarization data in band L from UAVSAR are used for change detection in agricultural fields and urban areas in the region of United States which the first image belong to 2014 and the second one is from 2017. To investigate the effect of polarization on the rate of change, full polarization data and dual polarization data were used and the results were compared. According to the results, full polarization shows more changes than dual polarization.