POLSAR IMAGE CLASSIFICATION VIA COMPLEX-VALUED CONVOLUTIONAL
NEURAL NETWORK COMBINING MEASURED DATA AND ARTIFICIAL FEATURES
Xianxiang Qin1, Tao Hu1, Huanxin Zou2, Wangsheng Yu1, Peng Wang1
Information and Navigation College, Air Force Engineering University, Xi’an 710077, China
1
2
College of Electronic Science, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China
ABSTRACT
Recently, many deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs)
have been developed for the polarimetric synthetic aperture
radar (PolSAR) image classification. For them, it is often a
hard task to obtain good results with limited training
samples. To release this problem, some strategies, such as
the feature-driven method that takes artificial features as the
input of CNN, have been proposed. However, since
artificial features are usually difficult to be universal, their
applicability is limited to a certain extent. For this issue, this
paper proposes a scheme of combining measured data and
artificial features with a complex-valued CNN (CV-CNN).
In our algorithm, not only the measured PolSAR data but
also some discriminative artificial features are employed as
the input of CV-CNN. The basic idea is that the measured
data contains the fully acquired information of targets, while
the artificial features include expert knowledge. Therefore,
by fusing them, better and more stable performance may be
obtained. The experiments performed on both actual and
simulated PolSAR images have validated the effectiveness
of the proposed algorithm.
Index Terms—Classification, polarimetric synthetic
aperture radar (PolSAR), complex-valued convolutional
neural network (CV-CNN), artificial features
1. INTRODUCTION
Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) is an
advanced microwave imaging sensor that can acquire rich
information of the earth’s surface. This makes the PolSAR
image classification an interesting and important application
of PolSAR data [1-6].
In the past decades, plenty of algorithms for PolSAR
image classification have been developed. In general, they
contain two main steps, i.e., feature extraction and classifier
designing [6]. Therefore, a large part of such algorithms are
devoted to extracting discriminative features of PolSAR
___________________________________________________
This work is supported by National Science Foundation of China
under Grant 41601436, 61403414 and 61703423, and in part by
the Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of
China under Grant 2018JM4029.
978-1-5386-9154-0/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE
images [1, 2]. However, since these features are designed
artificially, they are often only available to specific images.
Recently, deep learning techniques especially the
convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become
powerful tools for image processing. Referring to the
PolSAR image classification, some meaningful work with
CNNs has been performed. For examples, in [4], a four-
layer CNN for PolSAR image classification is designed and
provides satisfactory results. Besides, to satisfy the complex
form of PolSAR data, a complex-valued CNN (CV-CNN)
for PolSAR image classification is further developed and
adopted in [5], which can well utilize phase information to
improve the performance. Aiming to the limitation of
labeled samples, in [6], a polarimetric-feature-driven CNN
is proposed by taking some discriminative features as the
input of CNN. Though fine classification results were
obtained, its application is still somewhat limited since the
artificial features are usually difficult to be universal.
Focusing on this problem, in this paper, we propose a
scheme of combining both measured data and artificial
features by using the CV-CNN. The basic idea is that the
measured data contains original fully information of terrains,
while the artificial features include the expert knowledge.
So, by fusing them, better and more stable performance may
be obtained.
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes
the PolSAR data and some typical discriminative artificial
polarimetric features. The proposed classification scheme is
given in Section 3. Section 4 shows the experiment results
and we give our conclusion in Section 5.
2. MEASURED POLSAR DATA AND TYPICAL
ARTIFICIAL FEATURES
2.1. Measured PolSAR Data
For the general monostatic PolSAR, the measured data of
each pixel in a PolSAR image can be represented by a
coherency matrix as [1]
T11 T12 T13 
T= k Pk P*T = T12* T22 T23  , (1)
T13 T23 T33 
* *
 
where k P  1 / 2  S HH  S VV , SHH  S VV , 2S HV 
T
is the Pauli
3209 IGARSS 2019
scattering vector, the superscript “*” and “H” are the
conjugate and transpose operations, respectively, and 
denotes temporal or spatial ensemble averaging. It should be
pointed out that the non-diagonal elements of the coherency
matrix are usually complex that contain important phase
information of PolSAR data.
2.2. Typical Artificial Polarimetric Features
In [6], some typical roll-invariant polarimetric features and
two hidden polarimetric features in the rotation domain are
employed and show good performance.
2.2.1. Roll-Invariant Polarimetric Features
In the H/A/  decomposition model, the coherency matrix
T is represented by the sum of the scattering matrices of
three uncorrelated targets, that is [7]
T   i 1 i Ti   i 1 i ui u*T
3 3
i ,
where i and ui are the ith eigenvalue and eigenvector of
T , respectively. The modulus of the first element of ui is
represented by
ui 1  cos i ,
where  i  [0 ,90 ] is called the ith alpha angle.
 
Then, three roll-invariant polarimetric features including
the entropy H, mean alpha angle  and scattering
anisotropy A can be obtained as
  3
H   i 1 Pi log 3 Pi ,    i 1 Pi i , A  2
3 3
, (4)
2  3
where Pi  i /  i 1 i .
3
Besides, another classical roll-invariant polarimetric
feature is the total backscattering power SPAN given by
SPAN  T11  T22  T33 . (5)
2.2.2. Hidden Polarimetric Features in Rotation Domain
The null angles of Re T12  and Im T12  are defined by [6, 8]
1 As mentioned before, the measured PolSAR data is
 null _ Re T12    Angle Re T13   j Re T12  ,
(6)
2
1
 null _ Im T12    Angle Im T13   j Im T12  , (7)
2 framework to fuse the measured data and artificial features.
where Angle   is to get the phase. Re  and Im  are to
obtain the real and imaginary parts, respectively. These two
null angles are sensitive to plenty of terrains [6] and then are
useful for the PolSAR image classification.
3. PROPOSED CLASSFICATION SCHEME
3.1. CV-CNN
The architecture of CV-CNN [5] is shown in Fig. 1. It
consists of an input layer and an output layer, between
which are several alternations of convolutional and pooling
layers, fully connected layers. Different to the general real-
valued CNNs, all the elements of the CV-CNN, including
the input and output of all layers, the weights and biases of
the network, are fully defined in the complex domain.
Fig. 1. Architecture of the CV-CNN [5]
Since the CV-CNN is defined in the complex domain, it
is especially suitable to the complex PolSAR data. In [5], it
shows superior performance to its real-valued counterpart
for the PolSAR image classification.
(2)
3.2. Framework of the Proposed Algorithm
To enhance the performance of CV-CNN for PolSAR image
classification, in this paper, a novel scheme by combining
both the measured data and artificial features is proposed. It
(3) has four steps:
(1) Extract artificial features and form combined data
For a given PolSAR image, various artificial features can
be extracted. In this paper, those used in [6] including four
roll-invariant features and two null angle described in
Section 2 are employed. Then a 6-dimension vector of
artificial features for each pixel can be represented by
D F =  H , A,  , SPAN ,  null _ Re T12  ,  null _ Im T12  ,
T
(8)
Besides, the measured PolSAR data is described by the
six elements in the coherency matrix namely
DT = T11 , T12 , T13 , T22 , T23 , T33  .
T
(9)
Then, a 12-dimension vector of combined data
combining the measured PolSAR data and artificial features
for each pixel is formed as DC   DT , D F  .
T
(2) Determine a CV-CNN.
represented by complex values, while the artificial features
are generally real-valued. Since real values are special cases
of complex values, we choose the CV-CNN as the
(3) Train the CV-CNN.
To train the CV-CNN, the training samples are randomly
selected, and the complex backpropagation algorithm using
stochastic gradient descent (SGD) [5] are employed.
(4) Classify PolSAR image with the trained CV-CNN.
For each pixel of the PolSAR image to be classified, a
neighboring window with the size fitting the input of the
given CV-CNN is firstly determined. Then, by feeding the
combined data DC within the window into the trained CV-
CNN, the class label of the pixel can be obtained.
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 4. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND ANALYSIS The training procedure would stop if the total classification
error is smaller than a given threshold that is 0.1 here. Set
4.1. Experiments on Actual PolSAR Image the sample rates as 0.01, 0.05 and 0.1, the proposed scheme
and two contrast ones are performed for each given sample
In this section, a benchmark AIRSAR data set as shown in
rate. The representative classification results with the
Fig. 2(a) is employed. It is acquired in 1991 over Flevoland, sample rate as 0.05 are shown in Fig. 4.
The Netherlands, with the size as 1020×1024 pixels. The
ground-truth map is shown in Fig. 2(b), which indicates 14
categories in this field, including potato, fruit, oats, beet,
barley, onions, wheat, beans, peas, maize, flax, rapeseed,
grass and Lucerne.

(a) (b) (c)

(a) (b)
Fig. 2. (a) Actual PolSAR image and (b) ground-truth map. (d) (e) (f)
Fig. 4. Classification results of actual PolSAR image obtained
The employed architecture of CV-CNN is shown in Fig. by (a) comparison algorithm 1, (b) comparison algorithm 2 and (c)
the proposed algorithm.
3. Similar to that used in [5], it consists of two convolution
layers, one pooling layer, one fully connected layer, besides
It can be observed from Fig. 4 that all the classification
the input and output layers. The size of input of CV-CNN is
results obtained by the three algorithms are visually in good
12×12×d, where d=12 is the dimension of the input
consistent with the ground-truth. To evaluate the
combined data. In the network, there are 6 and 12 kernels of
performance of methods quantitatively, the overall accuracy
the same size as 3×3 for the first and second convolutional
(OA) of classification is used. The classification
layers, respectively. The average pooling [5] is adopted,
experiments are performed 10 times, and the mean OAs
with the size as 2×2. Moreover, the stride is 1 pixel in the
obtained by three algorithms are listed in Table 1.
convolutional layers and 2 pixels in the pooling layer.

 null _ Im T12  12×12×d

Table 1: OAs obtained by three algorithms
 Sample Comparison Comparison Proposed
...

...

A
H 10×10×6
T33 1×108 rate method 1 method 2 method
...

T
...

...

T1213 5×5×6
T11
3×3×12
1×Nc
0.01 0. 9506 0. 9600 0. 9604
...

0.05 0. 9573 0. 9693 0. 9694

...

...
...

...

Pooling
Conv1
2×2
6@3×3×d
Stride=1 Stride=2
Fig. 3. Architecture of the employed CV-CNN
To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, two
algorithms with the same network architecture but different
input are used for comparison. For the first one, only the
measured PolSAR data DT given in (9) is taken as the input
of CV-CNN, while the pure artificial features DF given in
(8) are applied for the second one. The sizes of input of CV-
CNN for them are both 12×12×6. For the sake of simplicity,
these two algorithms are called comparison algorithm 1 and
comparison algorithm 2, respectively.
For training the CV-CNN, the complex backpropagation
algorithm with SGD are employed, where the learning rate
 is 0.8, and the batchsize is 100 with 2000 training epoch.
Output
0.1 0. 9621 0. 9697 0. 9651
Conv2 layer
12@3×3×6
Fully connected
Stride=1
It can be seen from Table 1 that the proposed algorithm
and the CV-CNN with the six artificial features obtains the
results somewhat better than that with the pure measured
data, even though the features are extracted from the
measured data. It can be explained that the six employed
features are discriminative to the terrains in this actual
PolSAR image, while in the comparison method 1 the
information of measured data has not been fully extracted.
5.2. Experiment on Simulated PolSAR Image
Due to the limitation of actual PolSAR images, the flexible
simulated images are considered here to further evaluate the
performance of the proposed algorithm. Fig. 5(a) shows a
simulated PolSAR image of 140×490 pixels generated by

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the Monte Carlo method [1, 9]. It consists of 14 classes
following different Wishart distributions [1], of which the
coherent matrices are determined by averaging the previous
actual coherent matrix data of each class according to the
ground-truth. Besides, the equivalent number of looks (ENL)
is set as 10. Fig. 5(b) illustrates its ground-truth map.
(a)
(b)
Fig. 5. (a) Simulated PolSAR image and (b) ground-truth map.
In the experiment, five training sample rates are
considered, including 0.005, 0.01, 0.05, 0.1 and 0.15. The
other parameters for training CV-CNN are the same as
before. The OAs of three algorithms are illustrated in Fig. 6.
Moreover, the representative classification results with the
sample rate as 0.05 are shown in Fig. 7.
Fig. 6. OA plots of three algorithms.
(a)
(b)
(c)
Fig. 7. Classification results of simulated PolSAR image
obtained by (a) comparison algorithm 1, (b) comparison algorithm
2 and (c) the proposed algorithm.
It can be observed from Fig. 6 and Fig. 7 that, for this
simulated PolSAR image, the artificial features are not
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sufficient to discriminate all the classes well, yielding
obvious confusion between classes 6 and 8. By comparison,
the algorithm with pure measured data gives better results,
while the proposed algorithm provides best ones. This is
because the proposed scheme can make full use of the
advantages of both measured data and artificial features.
6. CONCLUSIONS
This paper proposes a novel classification scheme of
PolSAR images based on the CV-CNN. In our method, both
measured data and artificial features are taken as the input of
CV-CNN to make full use of their advantages. The
experiment results demonstrate that our method is superior
to that with pure measure data or pure artificial features.
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