The polarimetric features of oil spills in full polarimetric synthetic aperture radar images

Compared with single-polarized synthetic aperture radar （SAR） images, full polarimetric SAIl images contain not only geometrical and backward scattering characteristics, but also the polarization features of the scattering targets. Therefore, the polarimetric SAR has more advantages for oil spill detection on the sea surface. As a crucial step in the oil spill detection, a feature extraction directly influences the accuracy of oil spill discrimination. The polarimetric features of sea oil spills, such as polarimetric entropy, average scatter angle, in the full polarimetric SAR images are analyzed firstly. And a new polarimetric parameter P which reflects the proportion between Bragg and specular scattering signals is proposed. In order to investigate the capability of the polarimetric features for observing an oil spill, systematic comparisons and analyses of the multipolarization features are provided on the basis of the full polarimetric SAR images acquired by SIR-C/X-SAR and Radarsat-2. The experiment results show that in C-band SAR images the oil spills can be detected more easily than in L-band SAR images under low to moderate wind speed conditions. Moreover, it also finds that the new polarimetric parameter is sensitive to the sea surface scattering mechanisms. And the experiment results demonstrate that the new polarimetric parameter and pedestal height perform better than other polarimetric parameters for the oil spill detection in the C-band SAR images.

Coastal wind field retrieval from polarimetric synthetic aperture radar

Coastal winds are strongly influenced by topology and discontinuity between land and sea surfaces. Wind assessment from remote sensing in such a complex area remains a challenge. Space-borne scatterometer does not provide any information about the coastal wind field, as the coarse spatial resolution hampers the radar backscattering. Synthetic aperture radar （SAR） with a high spatial resolution and all-weather observation abilities has become one of the most important tools for ocean wind retrieval, especially in the coastal area. Conventional methods of wind field retrieval from SAR, however, require wind direction as initial information, such as the wind direction from numerical weather prediction models （NWP）, which may not match the time of SAR image acquiring. Fortunately, the polarimetric observations of SAR enable independent wind retrieval from SAR images alone. In order to accurately measure coastal wind fields, this paper proposes a new method of using co-polarization backscattering coefficients from polarimetric SAR observations up to polarimetric correlation backscattering coefficients, which are acquired from the conjugate product of co-polarization backscatter and cross-polarization backscatter. Co-polarization backscattering coefficients and polarimetric correlation backscattering coefficients are obtained form Radarsat-2 single-look complex （SLC） data.The maximum likelihood estimation is used to gain the initial results followed by the coarse spatial filtering and fine spatial filtering. Wind direction accuracy of the final inversion results is 10.67 with a wind speed accuracy of 0.32 m/s. Unlike previous methods, the methods described in this article utilize the SAR data itself to obtain the wind vectors and do not need external wind directional information. High spatial resolution and high accuracy are the most important features of the method described herein since the use of full polarimetric observations contains more information about the space measured.This article is a useful addition to the work of independent SAR wind retrieval. The experimental results herein show that it is feasible to employ the co-polarimetric backscattering coefficients and the polarimetric correlation backscattering coefficients for coastal wind field retrieval.

Method of moving target detection based on sub-image cancellation for single-antenna airborne synthetic aperture radar

The method of moving target detection based on subimage cancellation for single-antenna airborne SAR is presented. First the subimage is obtained through frequency processing is pointed out. The imaging difference of a stationary objects and moving object in the subimage based on the frequency division is analyzed from the fundamental principle. Then the developed method combines the shear averaging algorithm to focus on the moving target in the subimage, after the clutter suppression and the focusing position in each subimage is obtained. Next the observation model and the relative movement of the moving targets between the subimages estimate the moving targets. The theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the method is effective and can not only detect the moving targets, but also estimate their motion parameters precisely.

A novel oil spill detection method from synthetic aperture radar imageries via a bidimensional empirical mode decomposition

Oil spills pose a major threat to ocean ecosystems and their health. Synthetic aperture radar（SAR） sensors can detect oil spills on the sea surface. These oil spills appear as dark spots in SAR images. However, dark formations can be caused by a number of phenomena. It is aimed to distinguishing oil spills or look-alike objects. A novel method based on a bidimensional empirical mode decomposition is proposed. The selected dark formations are first decomposed into several bidimensional intrinsic mode functions and the residue. Subsequently, 64 dimension feature sets are calculated using the Hilbert spectral analysis and five new features are extracted with a relief algorithm. Mahalanobis distances are then used for classification. Three data sets containing oil spills or look-alikes are used to test the accuracy rate of the method. The accuracy rate is more than 90%. The experimental results demonstrate that the novel method can detect oil spills validly and accurately.

Design of synthetic aperture radar low-intercept radio frequency stealth

Not confined to a certain point,such as waveform,this paper systematically studies the low-intercept radio frequency(RF)stealth design of synthetic aperture radar(SAR)from the system level.The study is carried out from two levels.In the first level,the maximum low-intercept range equation of the conventional SAR system is deduced firstly,and then the maximum low-intercept range equation of the multiple-input multiple-output SAR system is deduced.In the second level,the waveform design and imaging method of the low-intercept RF SAR system are given and verified by simulation.Finally,the main technical characteristics of the lowintercept RF stealth SAR system are given to guide the design of low-intercept RF stealth SAR system.

A Review on Applications of Imaging Synthetic Aperture Radar with a Special Focus on Cryospheric Studies

The cryosphere is the frozen part of the Earth’s system. Snow and ice are the main constituents of the cryosphere and may be found in different states, such as snow, freshwater ice, sea ice, perma-frost, and continental ice masses in the form of glaciers and ice sheets. The present review mainly deals with state-of-the-art applications of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with a special emphasize on cryospheric information extraction. SAR is the most important active microwave remote sensing (RS) instrument for ice monitoring, which provides high-resolution images of the Earth’s surface. SAR is an ideal sensor in RS technology, which works in all-weather and day and night conditions to provide useful unprecedented information, especially in the cryospheric regions which are almost inaccessible areas on Earth. This paper addresses the technological evolution of SAR and its applications in studying the various components of the cryosphere. The arrival of SAR radically changed the capabilities of information extraction related to ice type, new ice formation, and ice thickness. SAR applications can be divided into two broad classes-polarimetric applications and interferometric applications. Polarimetric SAR has been effectively used for mapping calving fronts, crevasses, surface structures, sea ice, detection of icebergs, etc. The paper also summarizes both the operational and climate change research by using SAR for sea ice parameter detection. Digital elevation model (DEM) generation and glacier velocity mapping are the two most important applications used in cryosphere using SAR interferometry or interferometric SAR (InSAR). Space-borne InSAR techniques for measuring ice flow velocity and topography have developed rapidly over the last decade. InSAR is capable of measuring ice motion that has radically changed the science of glaciers and ice sheets. Measurement of temperate glacier velocities and surface characteristics by using airborne and space-borne interferometric satellite images have been the significant application in glaciology and cryospheric studies. Space-borne InSAR has contributed to major evolution in many research areas of glaciological study by measuring ice-stream flow velocity, improving understanding of ice-shelf processes, yielding velocity for flux-gate based mass-balance assessment, and mapping flow of mountain glaciers. The present review summarizes the salient development of SAR applications in cryosphere and glaciology.

Micro-motion effect in inverse synthetic aperture radar imaging of ballistic mid-course targets

For ballistic mid-course targets,in addition to constant orbital motion,the target or any structure on the target undergoes micro-motion dynamics,such as spin,precession and tumbling.The micro-motion characteristics of the ballistic mid-course targets were discussed.The target motion model and inverse synthetic aperture radar(ISAR) imaging model for this kind of targets were built.Then,the influence of micro-motion on ISAR imaging based on the established imaging model was presented.The computer simulation to get mid-course target echoes from static darkroom electromagnetic scattering data based on the established target motion model was realized.The imaging results of computer simulation show the validity of ISAR imaging analysis for micro-motion targets.

A NEW UNSUPERVISED CLASSIFICATION ALGORITHM FOR POLARIMETRIC SAR IMAGES BASED ON FUZZY SET THEORY

In this letter, a new method is proposed for unsupervised classification of terrain types and man-made objects using POLarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (POLSAR) data. This technique is a combi-nation of the usage of polarimetric information of SAR images and the unsupervised classification method based on fuzzy set theory. Image quantization and image enhancement are used to preprocess the POLSAR data. Then the polarimetric information and Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering algorithm are used to classify the preprocessed images. The advantages of this algorithm are the automated classification, its high classifica-tion accuracy, fast convergence and high stability. The effectiveness of this algorithm is demonstrated by ex-periments using SIR-C/X-SAR (Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar) data.

Application of improved equivalent edge currents in synthetic aperture radar imaging

Target modeling and scattering function calculating are important prerequisites and groundwork for the synthetic aperture radar（SAR） imaging simulation.According to the difficult problems that normal methods cannot calculate the scattering function of electrically large object under the condition to wideband,an effective method of improved equivalent edge currents is presented and applied to SAR imaging simulation for the first time.This method improves calculating velocity and has relatively high precision.The concrete steps of applying the method are given.By way of the simulation experiment,the effectiveness of the method is verified.

Inverse synthetic aperture radar range profile compensation of plasma-sheath-enveloped reentry object

The scattering points in a plasma sheath characterized with coupled velocities can cause pulse compression mismatching,which results in displacement and energy diffusion in the onedimension range profile.To solve this problem,we deduce the echo model of the plasma-sheathenveloped reentry object.By estimating the coupled velocities,we propose a compensation method to correct the defocus of an inverse synthetic aperture radar(ISAR)image in range dimension to improve the quality of the ISAR images.The simulation results suggest that the echoes from different regions of the surface of the reentry object have various coupling velocities,and the higher the coupled velocity,the more serious the displacement and energy diffusion in the range dimension.Our proposed method can correct the range dimension aberration.Two measurement metrics were used to evaluate the improvement of the compensation method.

Region-based classification by combining MS segmentation and MRF for POLSAR images

Speckle effects on classification results can be sup- pressed to some extent by introducing the contextual information. An unsupervised classification algorithm is proposed for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar （POLSAR） images based on the mean shift （MS） segmentation and Markov random field （MRF）. First, polarimetdc features are exacted by target decomposition for MS segmentation. An initial classification is executed by using the target decomposition and the agglomerative hierarchical clus- tering algorithm. Thereafter, a classification step based on MRF is performed by using the mean coherence matrices obtained for each segment. Under the MRF framework, the smoothness term is defined according to the distance between neighboring areas. By using POLSAR images acquired by the German Aerospace Centre and National Aeronautics and Space Administration/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the experimental results confirm that the proposed method has higher accuracy and better regional connectivity than other classification methods.

Three-dimensional positions of scattering centers reconstruction from multiple SAR images based on radargrammetry

A method and procedure is presented to reconstruct three-dimensional(3D) positions of scattering centers from multiple synthetic aperture radar(SAR) images. Firstly, two-dimensional(2D) attribute scattering centers of targets are extracted from 2D SAR images. Secondly, similarity measure is developed based on 2D attributed scatter centers' location, type, and radargrammetry principle between multiple SAR images. By this similarity, we can associate 2D scatter centers and then obtain candidate 3D scattering centers. Thirdly, these candidate scattering centers are clustered in 3D space to reconstruct final 3D positions. Compared with presented methods, the proposed method has a capability of describing distributed scattering center, reduces false and missing 3D scattering centers, and has fewer restrictionson modeling data. Finally, results of experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Polarimetric whitening filter for POLSAR image based on subspace decomposition

Speckle filtering is an indispensable pre-processing step for applications of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar （POLSAR）, such as terrain classification, target detection, etc. As one of the most typical methods, the polarimetric whitening filter （PWF） can be used to produce a minimum-speckle image by combining the complex elements of the scattering matrix, but polarimetric information is lost after the filtering process. A polarimetric filter based on subspaze decomposition which was proposed by Cu et al specializes in retrieving principle scattering characteristics, but the corresponding mean value of an image after filtering is not kept well. A new filter is proposed for improving the disadvantage based on subspace decomposition. Under the constraint that a weighted combination of the polarimetric SAR images equals to the output of the PWF, the Euclidean distance between an unfiltered parameter vector and a signal space vector is minimized so that noises can be reduced. It is also shown that the proposed method is equivalent to the subspace filter in the case of no constraint. Experimental results with the NASA/JPL airborne polarimetric SAR data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Double Polarization SAR Image Classification based on Object-Oriented Technology

This paper proposed to use double polarization synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image to classify surface feature, based on DEM. It takes fully use of the polarization information and external information. This pa-per utilizes ENVISAT ASAR APP double-polarization data of Poyang lake area in Jiangxi Province. Com-pared with traditional pixel-based classification, this paper fully uses object features (color, shape, hierarchy) and accessorial DEM information. The classification accuracy improves from the original 73.7% to 91.84%. The result shows that object-oriented classification technology is suitable for double polarization SAR’s high precision classification.

Integration of SAR Polarimetric Features and Multi-spectral Data for Object-Based Land Cover Classification

An object-based approach is proposed for land cover classification using optimal polarimetric parameters.The ability to identify targets is effectively enhanced by the integration of SAR and optical images.The innovation of the presented method can be summarized in the following two main points:①estimating polarimetric parameters(H-A-Alpha decomposition)through the optical image as a driver;②a multi-resolution segmentation based on the optical image only is deployed to refine classification results.The proposed method is verified by using Sentinel-1/2 datasets over the Bakersfield area,California.The results are compared against those from pixel-based SVM classification using the ground truth from the National Land Cover Database(NLCD).A detailed accuracy assessment complied with seven classes shows that the proposed method outperforms the conventional approach by around 10%,with an overall accuracy of 92.6%over regions with rich texture.

Intertidal area classification with generalized extreme value distribution and Markov random field in quad-polarimetric synthetic aperture radar imagery

Classification of intertidal area in synthetic aperture radar(SAR) images is an important yet challenging issue when considering the complicatedly and dramatically changing features of tidal fluctuation. The difficulty of intertidal area classification is compounded because a high proportion of this area is frequently flooded by water, making statistical modeling methods with spatial contextual information often ineffective. Because polarimetric entropy and anisotropy play significant roles in characterizing intertidal areas, in this paper we propose a novel unsupervised contextual classification algorithm. The key point of the method is to combine the generalized extreme value(GEV) statistical model of the polarization features and the Markov random field(MRF) for contextual smoothing. A goodness-of-fit test is added to determine the significance of the components of the statistical model. The final classification results are obtained by effectively combining the results of polarimetric entropy and anisotropy. Experimental results of the polarimetric data obtained by the Chinese Gaofen-3 SAR satellite demonstrate the feasibility and superiority of the proposed classification algorithm.

New algorithm of target classification in polarimetric SAR

The different approaches used for target decomposition （TD） theory in radar polarimetry are reviewed and three main types of theorems are introduced： those based on Mueller matrix, those using an eigenvector analysis of the coherency matrix, and those employing coherent decomposition of the scattering matrix. Support vector machine （SVM）, as a novel approach in pattern recognition, has demonstrated success in many fields. A new algorithm of target classification, by combining target decomposition and the support vector machine, is proposed. To conduct the experiment, the polarimetric synthetic aperture radar （SAR） data are used. Experimental results show that it is feasible and efficient to target classification by applying target decomposition to extract scattering mechanisms, and the effects of kernel function and its parameters on the classification efficiency are significant.

SAR images classification method based on Dempster-Shafer theory and kernel estimate

To study the scene classification in the Synthetic Aperture Radar （SAR） image, a novel method based on kernel estimate, with the Maxkov context and Dempster-Shafer evidence theory is proposed. Initially, a nonpaxametric Probability Density Function （PDF） estimate method is introduced, to describe the scene of SAR images. And then under the Maxkov context, both the determinate PDF and the kernel estimate method axe adopted respectively, to form a primary classification. Next, the primary classification results are fused using the evidence theory in an unsupervised way to get the scene classification. Finally, a regularization step is used, in which an iterated maximum selecting approach is introduced to control the fragments and modify the errors of the classification. Use of the kernel estimate and evidence theory can describe the complicated scenes with little prior knowledge and eliminate the ambiguities of the primary classification results. Experimental results on real SAR images illustrate a rather impressive performance.

A method for coastal oil tank detection in polarimetric SAR images based on recognition of T-shaped harbor

To automatically detect oil tanks in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar（SAR） images, a coastal oil tank detection method is proposed based on recognition of T-shaped harbor. First of all, the T-shaped harbor is detected to locate the region of interest（ROI） of oil tanks. Then all suspicious targets in the ROI are extracted by the segmentation of strong scattering targets and the classifier of H/α. The template targets are selected from the suspicious targets by the combination of a proposed circular degree parameter and the similarity parameter（SP） of the polarimetric coherency matrix. Finally, oil tanks are detected according to the statistics of the similarity parameter between each suspicious target and template targets in ROI. Polarimetric SAR data acquired by RADARSAT-2 over Berkeley and Singapore areas are used for testing. Experiment results show that most of the targets are correctly detected and the overall detection rate is close to 80%.The false rate is effectively reduced by the proposed algorithm compared with the method without T-shaped harbor recognition.

Power of SAR Imagery and Machine Learning in Monitoring Ulva prolifera:A Case Study of Sentinel-1 and Random Forest

Automatically detecting Ulva prolifera(U.prolifera)in rainy and cloudy weather using remote sensing imagery has been a long-standing problem.Here,we address this challenge by combining high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR)imagery with the machine learning,and detect the U.prolifera of the South Yellow Sea of China(SYS)in 2021.The findings indicate that the Random Forest model can accurately and robustly detect U.prolifera,even in the presence of complex ocean backgrounds and speckle noise.Visual inspection confirmed that the method successfully identified the majority of pixels containing U.prolifera without misidentifying noise pixels or seawater pixels as U.prolifera.Additionally,the method demonstrated consistent performance across different im-ages,with an average Area Under Curve(AUC)of 0.930(+0.028).The analysis yielded an overall accuracy of over 96%,with an average Kappa coefficient of 0.941(+0.038).Compared to the traditional thresholding method,Random Forest model has a lower estimation error of 14.81%.Practical application indicates that this method can be used in the detection of unprecedented U.prolifera in 2021 to derive continuous spatiotemporal changes.This study provides a potential new method to detect U.prolifera and enhances our under-standing of macroalgal outbreaks in the marine environment.