On the ability of polsar measurements to discriminate among mangrove species

In this article, a polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) feature is analyzed to discriminate among different mangrove species. This feature, which is related to the Wishart distance, maximizes the contrast among mangrove species optimizing the ratio between quadratic forms. The discrimination performance is assessed both against ground truth and by intercomparing it with conventional model-based decomposition features. Results obtained by processing actual L- and C-band full-polarimetric synthetic aperture radar scenes collected by ALOS-PALSAR-2 and RADARSAT-2 missions show that the proposed approach achieves accurate enough discrimination performance to differentiate two out of the four mangrove species. In addition, results suggest using a multifrequency PolSAR approach to maximize discrimination performance.