PolSAR Image Classification Using Polarimetric-Feature-Driven Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification is an important application. Advanced deep learning techniques represented by deep convolutional neural network (CNN) have been utilized to enhance the classification performance. One current challenge is how to adapt deep CNN classifier for PolSAR classification with limited training samples, while keeping good generalization performance. This letter attempts to contribute to this problem. The core idea is to incorporate expert knowledge of target scattering mechanism interpretation and polarimetric feature mining to assist deep CNN classifier training and improve the final classification performance. A polarimetric-feature-driven deep CNN classification scheme is established. Both classical roll-invariant polarimetric features and hidden polarimetric features in the rotation domain are used to drive the proposed deep CNN model. Comparison studies validate the efficiency and superiority of the proposal. For the benchmark AIRSAR data, the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art classification accuracy. Meanwhile, the convergence speed from the proposed polarimetric-feature-driven CNN approach is about 2.3 times faster than the normal CNN method. For multitemporal UAVSAR data sets, the proposed scheme achieves comparably high classification accuracy as the normal CNN method for train-used temporal data, while for train-not-used data it obtains an average of 4.86% higher overall accuracy than the normal CNN method. Furthermore, the proposed strategy can also produce very promising classification accuracy even with very limited training samples.