Comparison of C- and L-band simulated compact polarized SAR in oil spill detection

This paper presents the compact polarized (CP) pseudo quad-pol parameters for the detection of marine oil spills and segregation of lookalikes using simulated CP SAR data from full-polarized (FP) SAR imagery. According to the CP theory, 11 polarized parameters generally used for the detection of oil spills were derived from reconstructed pseudo quad-pol data for both C and L bands. In addition, the reconstruction performance between C and L bands was also compared by evaluating the reconstruction accuracy of retrieved polarized parameters. The results show that apart from σ HV and RH , other polarized parameters of σ HH , σ VV , H , α , φ H–V , r , ρ H–V , and γ can be reconstructed with satisfactory accuracy for both C and L bands. Furthermore, C band has a higher reconstruction accuracy than L band, especially for φ H–V . Moreover, the effect of reconstruction of polarized parameters on oil spill classification was also evaluated using the maximum likelihood classification (MLC) method. According to the evaluation of kappa coefficients and mapping accuracy, it is recommended to use σ HH , σ VV , H , ρ H–V , and γ of the C band CP SAR for marine oil spill classification.