  POLSAR image has an advantage over optical image because it can be acquired
independently of cloud cover and solar illumination. PolSAR image
classification is a hot and valuable topic for the interpretation of POLSAR
image. In this paper, a novel POLSAR image classification method is proposed
based on polarimetric scattering coding and sparse support matrix machine.
First, we transform the original POLSAR data to get a real value matrix by the
polarimetric scattering coding, which is called polarimetric scattering matrix
and is a sparse matrix. Second, the sparse support matrix machine is used to
classify the sparse polarimetric scattering matrix and get the classification
map. The combination of these two steps takes full account of the
characteristics of POLSAR. The experimental results show that the proposed
method can get better results and is an effective classification method.
