Compared with single-polarization synthetic aperture radar (SAR), full-polarization SAR can not only collect the echo intensity of backscattered from the sea surface, but also can collect the phase information. For oil spill detection, polarimetric SAR has more advantages. Features extraction is a crucial step for oil spill discrimination. In this paper, eight kinds of polarimetric features, such as the polarimetric entropy, average scatter angle and so on, have been investigated to analyze the capability of the polarimetric features to observe an oil spill at C-band and L-band, and to identify the most powerful multi-polarimetric SAR descriptors for oil spill detection. And a systematic comparison of the eight multi-polarization features is provided. Here, the analysis is conducted on the quad-pol SAR images acquired by the SIR-C/X-SAR. The experiment results show that the pedestal height and the parameter P perform better than the other polarimetric features at C-band.
['Honglei Zheng', 'Yanmin Zhang', 'Yunhua Wang']
Polarimetric features analysis of oil spills in C-band and L-band SAR images