Physics-aware feature learning of SAR images with deep neural networks: A case study

This paper proposes a novel unsupervised learning method to learn discriminative physics-aware features of Synthetic Aperture Radar images with deep neural networks. We conduct a case study of sea-ice classification using Sentinel-1Dual-polarized SAR data and the corresponding scattering mechanisms...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2021 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS
Main Authors: Huang, Zhongling, Dumitru, Corneliu Octavian, Ren, Jun
Format: Conference Object
Language:unknown
Published: 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://elib.dlr.de/142805/
https://igarss2021.com/view_paper.php?PaperNum=2617
Description
Summary:This paper proposes a novel unsupervised learning method to learn discriminative physics-aware features of Synthetic Aperture Radar images with deep neural networks. We conduct a case study of sea-ice classification using Sentinel-1Dual-polarized SAR data and the corresponding scattering mechanisms derived from H/αWishart classification. The scattering mechanisms are encoded as a combination of topics for each SAR image as physics attributes, which guide the deep convolutional neural network to learn physics-aware features automatically. A novel objective function is designed to demonstrate how to conduct the physics-guided learning processing. The experiments show the proposed method can learn discriminative features from SAR images without labeled data, which can achieve a comparable classification result with supervised CNN learning.