Sparsity based full rank polarimetric reconstruction of coherence matrix T

In the frame of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomography, full-ranks reconstruction framework has been recognized as a significant technique for fully characterization of superimposed scatterers in a resolution cell. The technique, mainly is characterized by the advantages of polarimetric scattering pattern reconstruction, allows physical feature extraction of the scatterers. In this paper, to overcome the limitations of conventional full-rank tomographic techniques in natural environments, a polarimetric estimator with advantages of super-resolution imaging is proposed. Under the frame of compressive sensing (CS) and sparsity based reconstruction, the profile of second order polarimetric coherence matrix T is recovered. Once the polarimetric coherence matrices of the scatterers are available, the physical features can be extracted using classical polarimetric processing techniques. The objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of the proposed full-rank polarimetric reconstruction by means of conventional three-component decomposition of T, and focusing on the consistency of vertical resolution and polarimetric scattering pattern of the scatterers. The outcomes from simulated and two different real data sets confirm that significant improvement can be achieved in the reconstruction quality with respect to conventional approaches.