An investigation on the appropriate feature and parameter retrieval algorithm is conducted for feature-based registration of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The commonly used features such as tie points, Harris corner, SIFT, and SURF are comprehensively evaluated. SURF is shown to outperform others on criteria such as the geometrical invariance of feature and descriptor, the extraction and matching speed, the localization accuracy, as well as the robustness to decorrelation and speckling. The processing result reveals that SURF has nice flexibility to SAR speckles for the potential relationship between Fast-Hessian detector and refined Lee filter. Moreover, the use of Fast-Hessian to oversampled images with unaltered sampling step helps to improve the registration accuracy to subpixel (i.e., <1 pixel). As for parameter retrieval, the widely used random sample consensus (RANSAC) is inappropriate because it may trap into local occlusion and result in uncertain estimation. An extended fast least trimmed squares (EF-LTS) is proposed, which behaves stable and averagely better than RANSAC. Fitting SURF features with EF-LTS is hence suggested for SAR image registration. The nice performance of this scheme is validated on both InSAR and MiniSAR image pairs.
Part of the book: Advanced Remote Sensing Technology for Synthetic Aperture Radar Applications, Tsunami Disasters, and Infrastructure
Polarization characterizes the vector state of EM wave. When interacting with polarized wave, rough natural surface often induces dominant surface scattering; building also presents dominant double-bounce scattering. Tsunami/earthquake causes serious destruction just by inundating the land surface and destroying the building. By analyzing the change of surface and double-bounce scattering before and after disaster, we can achieve a monitoring of damages. This constitutes one basic principle of polarimetric microwave remote sensing of tsunami/earthquake. The extraction of surface and double-bounce scattering from coherency matrix is achieved by model-based decomposition. The general four-component scattering power decomposition with unitary transformation (G4U) has been widely used in the remote sensing of tsunami/earthquake to identify surface and double-bounce scattering because it can adaptively enhance surface or double-bounce scattering. Nonetheless, the strict derivation in this chapter conveys that G4U cannot always strengthen the double-bounce scattering in urban area nor strengthen the surface scattering in water or land area unless we adaptively combine G4U and its duality for an extended G4U (EG4U). Experiment on the ALOS-PALSAR datasets of 2011 great Tohoku tsunami/earthquake demonstrates not only the outperformance of EG4U but also the effectiveness of polarimetric remote sensing in the qualitative monitoring and quantitative evaluation of tsunami/earthquake damages.
Part of the book: Tsunami