A Study on Polarimetric Correlation Coefficient for Feature Extraction of Polarimetric SAR Data

This paper attempts to use the polarimetric correlation coefficient for extraction of the polarimetric features of the urban areas and the natural distributed areas from Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (POLSAR) data. There is a possibility that the polarimetric correlation coefficient can reveal various scattering mechanisms of terrains based on the reflection symmetry property. In order to verify the capability of polarimetric correlation coefficient, we examined the behavior of this coefficient of the urban areas and the natural distributed areas with respect to the several polarimetric scattering models in the linear and circular polarization bases, and the difference of the polarimetric scattering characteristics between these two areas was derived. It was confirmed that the polarimetric correlation coefficient is useful to extract the polarimetric features from the actual L-band and X-band POLSAR data.