University Events

Description: TOPIC: FOURTH ORDER CUMULANT-BASED PROCESSING TECHNIQUE FOR SEPARATING GROUND AND VEGETATION COMPONENTS IN POLARIMETRIC SAR INTERFEROMETRY

LOCATION: Lester W. Cory Conference Room, Science & Engineering Building (Group II), Room 213A

ABSTRACT:
Many different processing techniques have been developed for utilizing polarimetric signatures to separate the different scattering mechanisms in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) interferometry. Well established signal processing techniques such as MUSIC and ESPRIT have been adopted in SAR interferometric processing for estimating the phase difference between the measurements from different SAR tracks. In previous work, the second order statistics in the form of the covariance matrix of the polarimetric SAR signature has been used to estimate this phase difference and to identify the different scattering mechanisms. In recent years, there has been considerable interest in techniques which use higher order statistics such as fourth order cumulants for direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation. Several variations of this technique have been developed and have shown considerable promise in terms of improving the angular resolution of the DoA estimation. In this study, a technique which uses the ESPRIT algorithm with fourth order statistics to separate the ground and vegetation components in polarimetric SAR measurements is presented. This technique can be applied to both the MUSIC and the ESPRIT algorithms. However, the focus of this thesis is the application of the fourth order cumulant based technique as the input to the ESPRIT algorithm. Simulation results indicate that the fourth order results produce similar estimation accuracy as second order results. When applied to field data, the fourth order cumulant did not produce meaningful results because of the Gaussianity of field measurements. In this thesis, a modified approach which does not use the correction terms in the fourth order cumulants is presented and is shown to perform as well as the second order approach.

NOTE: All ECE Graduate Students are ENCOURAGED to attend.
All interested parties are invited to attend. Open to the public.

Advisor: Dr. Dayalan P. Kasilingam
Committee Members: Dr. Paul J. Gendron, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Ms. Tracy Rausch, CEO and Founder, DocBox

*For further information, please contact Dr. Dayalan P. Kasilingam at 508.999.8534, or via email at dkasilingam@umassd.edu.