PolSAR tools: A QGIS plugin for generating SAR descriptors

Abstract

The demand for processing tools increases with the increasing number of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite missions and datasets. However, to process SAR data, a minimal number of free tools are available (PolSARpro, SNAP) that consolidate all necessary preprocessing steps. Bearing this in mind, there is a need to develop specific tools for the remote sensing user community to derive polarimetric descriptors like vegetation indices and decomposition parameters. Besides, to the best of our knowledge, there are no such free tools available on a GIS platform, which is often necessary for the processing of SAR remote sensing datasets. Hence we have developed a plugin for QGIS that supports data for the three available polarimetric modes (i.e., full-, compact, and dual). The PolSAR tools plugin generates polarimetric descriptors (viz., vegetation indices, polarimetric decomposition parameters) from the 3x3 (C3/T3) or the 2x2 (C2/T2) covariance (coherency) matrices obtained from the ESA’s PolSARpro software. The input data needs to be in PolSARpro format (*.bin and *.hdr). The plugin is coded in Python and is dependant on the QGIS framework. It uses the following Python libraries (bundled with QGIS): numpy, and gdal.