This paper presents a coherent decomposition scheme for polarimetric SAR data. Coherent decomposition means the decomposition is applied to a single or a few scattering matrix data. Based on the scattering matrix acquired with an FM-CW polarimetric SAR system, we have devised a simple decomposition technique using the coherency matrix for the purpose of identifying scatterers. This paper presents the decomposition technique and some decomposition results obtained by a fully polarimetric FM-CW radar. It is shown the scattering mechanisms are well recovered and the orientation angles of wire scatterer are precisely measured.

In this paper, we examine the polarimetric characteristics and the potential of the coherent decomposition in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry. Coherent scattering decomposition based on the coherence optimization can separate effective phase center of different scattering mechanisms and can be used to generate canopy digital elevation model (DEM). This decomposition is applied to a simplified stochastic scattering model such as forest canopy. However, since the polarimetric characteristics are not well understood when the decomposition is carried out, we investigate its characteristics and potential using polarimetric entropy-alpha and three-component scattering matrix decomposition. The results show that the first and third components correspond to the lower and upper layer, respectively, in ideal case. In this investigation, SIR-C/X-SAR data of the Tien Shan flight-pass are used.