Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar data and the complex Wishart distribution

Allan Aasbjerg Nielsen, Knut Conradsen, Henning Skriver

AbstractWhen working with multi-look fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data an appropriate way of representing the backscattered signal consists of the so-called covariance matrix. For each pixel this is a 3 by 3 Hermitian, positive definite matrix which follows a complex Wishart distribution. Based on this distribution a test statistic for equality of two such matrices and an associated asymptotic probability for obtaining a smaller value of the test statistic are given and applied to segmentation, change detection and edge detection in polarimetric SAR data. In a case study EMISAR L-band data from 17 April 1998 and 20 May 1998 covering agricultural fields near Foulum, Denmark, are used.
TypeConference paper [With referee]
Conference13th Scandinavian Conference on Image Analysis (SCIA)
EditorsJosef Bigun and Tomas Gustavsson
Year2003    Month June    pp. 1082-1089
PublisherSpringer
AddressRichard Petersens Plads, Building 321
SeriesLecture Notes on Computer Science 2749
Electronic version(s)[pdf]
BibTeX data [bibtex]
IMM Group(s)Image Analysis & Computer Graphics, Geoinformatics