COSMO-SkyMed HH/VV PingPong Mode SAR Data to Discriminate Among Sea, Urban, and Vegetated Areas

In this study, the sensitivity of COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) dual-polarimetric HH/VV Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data with respect to sea, vegetated, and urban areas is investigated. A dual polarimetric feature, namely the complex correlation between the copolarized channels, is introduced to exploit the inherent peculiarities of the CSK incoherent dual-polarization PingPong mode for distinguishing the three scenarios. The dual-pol feature is contrasted with the correlation between the HH and VV amplitudes, the copolarized ratio, and with conventional single-pol ones, namely the HH and VV intensities.