Polarimetric Stationarity Omnibus Test (PSOT) for Selecting Persistent Scatterer Candidates with Quad-Polarimetric SAR Datasets

In the traditional single polarimetric persistent scatterers interferometric (PSI) technology, the amplitude dispersion index (ADI) is usually used to select persistent scatterer candidates (PSC). Obviously, based on single polarimetric information, it is difficult to use the statistical characteristics for comprehensively describing the temporal stability of scatterers, which leads to a decrease in persistent scatterer (PS) density. Considering that the temporal polarimetric stationarity of PS, the paper is based on complex Wishart distribution and proposes the polarimetric stationarity omnibus test (PSOT) for identifying PSC. The nonstationary pixels can be removed by the preset significance threshold, which reduces the subsequent processing error and the calculation cost. Then, the exhaustive search polarimetric optimization (ESPO) method is selected for improving the phase quality of PSCs while suppressing the sidelobe of the strong scatterer effectively. For validating the effectiveness of the proposed method, we select a time-series quad-polarimetric ALOS PALSAR-1 images in an urban area as experimental data and mainly perform five group experiments for detailed analysis, including the PSOT+ESPO, ADI+ESPO, ADI+HH, ADI+HV, and ADI+VV. The results show that the proposed PSOT+ESPO method has a better performance on both PSC selection and interferometric phase optimization aspects than that of other methods. Specifically, compared to the last four methods, both the PSCs and PSs identified by the proposed PSOT+ESPO are more concentrated in the high-coherence region. The PSs with the standard deviation (STD) less than 5mm in the PSOT+ESPO method account for 94% of all PSs, which is greater than that of the ADI+ESPO, ADI+HH, ADI+HV, and ADI+VV methods, respectively.