الفهرس 
Chapter 1: IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The quad-polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (quad-PolSAR) systems for earth remote sensing have great importance for environmental monitoring and many vital applications such weather and vegetation monitoring and other important economical applications. The present thesis proposes novel methods for simulation and classification of PolSAR-imaged land covers.
In this thesis, a novel method is proposed to estimate the electric properties and water content of ground soil by applying the Target Decomposition (TD) theory for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images. The proposed method depends on the 𝜖-𝜎 characteristic curves of the soil which are unique for each soil type at a specific frequency. This method is examined for the clayey type soil which is found in most of the natural vegetated land areas. Also, a novel method is developed, in the present thesis, for realistic simulation of PolSAR images of natural lands including forest regions, grasslands, and bare lands being prepared for gardens or crop cultivation. This method is based on the reverse of PolSAR TD theory. The numerical results presented in this thesis are concerned with the characterization of the most common type of clayey soil. Also, some of the numerical results presented in the present thesis aim to get realistic PolSAR datasets using the inverse TD theory. Finally, some numerical results are presented for quantitative assessment of the method proposed for the estimation of the electric properties and water content of the clayey soil using the datasets which are obtained through realistic simulations of forested areas, gardens, grasslands, and bare lands being prepared for cultivated plants. It is found, through the numerical investigations and quantitative assessment, that the dielectric constant, electric conductivity, and water content of the investigated clayey types of soil are accurately estimated.
The present thesis proposes a novel method to estimate the seawater surface salinity and temperature from the data collected by quad-PolSAR systems. The proposed method requires the knowledge of the curves that characterize the dependence of the complex dielectric constant of the seawater surface on the salinity and temperature at the operating frequency of the PolSAR system. Two types of quad-PolSAR datasets are used to test the proposed method. The first dataset is obtained by simulation at 1.27 GHz and the method of simulation is described in the thesis. The other dataset is real quad-PolSAR data acquired by the fine quad mode of Radarsat-2 space-borne sensor for the Strait of Gibraltar at 5.405 GHz. The proposed method depends on the theory of SAR TD with multiple-component scattering model (MCSM), where the single-bounce covariance matrix is deduced from the covariance matrix of the quad-PolSAR data representing the backscattering from the seawater surface. The proposed method is applied to both the simulated and real datasets resulting in good accuracy of the estimated values of the seawater permittivity and the corresponding salinity and temperature when compared with the ground-truth values. It is shown that the PolSAR system operating in the L-band (1.27 GHz) is preferable to that operating in the C-band (5.405 GHz) due to the degenerate relations (multivalued functions) describing the dependence of the complex dielectric constant of the seawater on the salinity and temperature in the C-band. The effects of the environmental and operational conditions of the PolSAR system on the collected backscattering data are modeled as additive Gaussian noise (AGN). The dependence of the accuracy of the estimated seawater parameters on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is investigated and quantitatively assessed.