SAR Image Colorization: Converting Single-Polarization to Fully Polarimetric Using Deep Neural Networks

Abstract: A deep neural networks based method is proposed to convert single polarization grayscale SAR image to fully polarimetric. It consists of two components: a feature extractor network to extract hierarchical multi-scale spatial features of grayscale SAR image, followed by a feature translator network to map spatial feature to polarimetric feature with which the polarimetric covariance matrix of each pixel can be reconstructed. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments with real fully polarimetric data are conducted to show the efficacy of the proposed method. The reconstructed full-pol SAR image agrees well with the true full-pol image. Existing PolSAR applications such as model-based decomposition and unsupervised classification can be applied directly to the reconstructed full-pol SAR images. This framework can be easily extended to reconstruction of full-pol data from compact-pol data. The experiment results also show that the proposed method could be potentially used for interference removal on the cross-polarization channel.