Modified Reflection Symmetry Decomposition and a New Polarimetric Product of GF-3

Model-based Incoherent Polarimetric Decomposition (MIPD) is a frequently used technique to analyze the scattering characteristics of multilook Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) data. A reflection symmetry decomposition (RSD) algorithm was proposed to overcome two limitations of Freeman–Durden decomposition. In this letter, a modified RSD (MRSD) algorithm with an improved approach to determining the surface scattering power and the double-bounce scattering power of RSD is proposed. MRSD causes no loss of polarimetric information, and its outputs consist of nine independent real-valued parameters. Based on these two properties, a new polarimetric product is created for Chinese GF-3 satellite. The product is very convenient for PolSAR data application users because it can be directly displayed by geographic information system (GIS) software, and its ground pixel sizes are very close to be square. The case study with six real GF-3 images demonstrates the effectiveness of both MRSD and the new product.