Local edginess measures in PolSAR imagery by using stochastic distances

Abstract

In this paper we study the local behavior of Fully PolSAR (Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar) images defined by 3 × 3 complex Wishart distributions. We propose a generalization of the well-known structure tensor to Fully PolSAR images, as well as a measure of the smoothness of such predominant direction. This measure provides local information as the predominant direction of maximum variation of the complex Wishart distribution in a neighborhood of an image domain point (x, y). We use stochastic distances defined in the space of Wishart matrices to generalize de structure tensor to PolSAR images. The study of the local behavior of PolSAR images address a number of processing and analysis problems. In particular, in this paper we apply this new approach to edge estimation using the magnitude of the PolSAR image variation provided by the generalized structure tensor. We also show promising results for simulated and actual PolSAR data.