Influence of Wave Polarization on the Texture Characteristics of Objects in Radar Images

Abstract

The influence of wave polarization on texture parameters of objects in radar images (RIs) is examined by calculations of the second-order statistics (the fractal dimension and the Haralick textural features) on the basis of polarimetric data acquired with the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR) system for two wavelengths of the C- and L-ranges. The variance analysis of the samples of fractal dimension values for natural forested and water objects have revealed no influence of polarization on the values before the speckle filtering; however, after speckle filtering, statistically valid differences have been found in the mean values of some pairs of samples. For sample pairs of the copolarizations VV–HH and cross polarizations HV–VH, a random nature of the differences observed in the mean fractal dimension values has been shown. This conclusion is also true for the Haralick textural features of a water object—the contrast, inverse moment, and entropy. Statistically valid differences in the mean values of the Haralick textural features for urban and water objects have been revealed both before and after speckle filtering. For a forested object, variance analysis shows that the polarization-dependent differences in the mean values of the textural feature samples are statistically unreliable.