A Classification Method Based on Polarimetric Entropy and GEV Mixture Model for Intertidal Area of PolSAR Image

Abstract

This paper proposes a classification method for the intertidal area using quad-polarimetric synthetic aperture radar data. In this paper, a systematic comparison of four well-known multipolarization features is provided so that appropriate features can be selected based on the characteristics of the intertidal area. Analysis result shows that the two most powerful multipolarization features are polarimetric entropy and anisotropy. Furthermore, through our detailed analysis of the scattering mechanisms of the polarimetric entropy, the Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution is employed to describe the statistical characteristics of the intertidal area based on the extreme value theory. Consequently, a new classification method is proposed by combining the GEV Mixture Models and the EM algorithm. Finally, experiments are performed on the Radarsat-2 quad-polarization data of the Dongtan intertidal area, Shanghai, to validate our method.