In this paper, a new method is proposed for supervised classification of ground cover types by using polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. The concept of similarity parameter between two scattering matrices is introduced for characterizing target scattering mechanism. Four similarity parameters of each pixel in image are used for classification. They are the similarity parameters between a pixel and a plane, a dihedral, a helix and a wire. The total received power of each pixel is also used since the similarity parameter is independent of the spans of target scattering matrices. The supervised classification is carried out based on the principal component analysis. This analysis is applied to each data set in image in the feature space for getting the corresponding feature transform vector. The inner product of two vectors is used as a distance measure in classification. The classification result of the new scheme is shown and it is compared to the results of principal component analysis with other decomposition coefficients, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the similarity parameters.

In this letter, a new formula is proposed for calculating the polarization entropy, based on the least square method. There is no need to calculate the eigenvalues of a covariance matrix as well as to use logarithms of values. So the time for computing the polarization entropy is reduced. Using polarimetric SAR data, the authors validate the effectiveness of the new formula.

Based on filtering ground clutter power directly in the frequency domain, a new non-coefficient Adaptive MTI (AMTI) scheme is presented in this letter. The results of simulation example show that this scheme has smaller signal-to-noise ratio loss than the classical AMTI based on spectral estimation, as well as high improvement factor.

The high-resolution frequency estimators most commonly used, such as Least Square (LS) method based on AR model, MVSE, MUSIC and ESPRIT, determine estimates of the sinusoidal frequencies from the sample noise-corrupted data. In this paper, a new frequency estimation method named Pole-Placement Least Square (PPLS) is presented, which is a modified LS method with a certain number of model poles restricted to the unit circle. The statistical performance of PPLS is studied numerically, and compared with the Cramer-Rao bound as well as the statistical performance corresponding to the LS methods. PPLS is shown to have higher resolution than the conventional LS method. The relationship between poles location and its resolution is also discussed in detail.

In this paper, we consider the problem of bearing estimation for spatially distributed sources in unknown spatially-correlated noise. Assumed that the noise covariance matrix is centro-Hermitian, a differential denoising scheme is developed. Combined it with the classic DSPE algorithm, a differential denoising estimator is formulated. Its modified version is also derived. Exactly, the differential processing is first imposed on the covariance matrix of array outputs. The resulting differential signal subspace (DSS) is then utilized to weight array outputs. The noise components orthogonal to DSS are eliminated. Based on eigenvalue decomposition of the covariance matrix of weighted array outputs, the DSPE null spectrum is constructed. The asymptotic performance of the proposed bearing estimator is evaluated in a closed form. Moreover, in order to improve the performance of bearing estimation in case of low signal-to-noise ratio, a modified differential denoising estimator is proposed. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed estimators under the low SNR case. The impacts of angular spread and number of sensors are also investigated.

In this letter, the concept of cross-entropy is introduced for unsupervised polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image classification. The difference between two scatterers is decomposed into three parts, i.e., the difference of average scattering characteristic, the difference of scattering randomness and the difference of scattering matrix span. All these three parts are expressed in cross-entropy formats. The minimum cross-entropy principle is adopted to make classification decision. It works well in unsupervised terrain classification with a NASA/JPL AIRSAR image.

The concept of the equi-phase curve is introduced for the cross-polarized channel case. It is proved that the equi-phase curves are a series of half circles on the Poincare sphere, and that all these curves have two common ends. Based on the introduced concept, this letter demonstrates the distribution of the received voltage's phases on the Poincare sphere. In addition, it is shown theoretically that the cross-polarized phase of the off-diagonal elements of a scattering matrix is unstable for most natural targets. Therefore, the cross-polarized phase information cannot be used for extracting target characteristics in polarimetric radar remote sensing.

A modified moving DFT algorithm and a new SMTD structure are proposed in this paper. The new SMTD structure adopts both batch-mode signal channel estimating and the modified moving DFT algorithm, which leads to dramatic decline of the computational load.