Physics-Aware Complex-Valued State Space Model with Scattering-Prior Feature Modulation for PolSAR Image Classification
Authors: Fangyan Zhang, Fan Zhang, Shiqi Zhou, Jun Ni, Carlos López-Martínez, Qiang Yin
Organizations: The College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing, China · The School of Information Science and Engineering, Yunnan University, Kunming, China · The Department of Signal Theory and Communications, Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain
Abstract
Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification is a representative task for physics-aware GeoAI, where land-cover semantics are closely coupled with electromagnetic scattering mechanisms. Many existing complex-valued networks can preserve amplitude-phase information, but they are often limited in long-range spatial dependency modeling and usually incorporate polarimetric priors only as input-level or shallow auxiliary features. As a result, physical knowledge is insufficiently used to guide deep feature evolution. To address this issue, this paper proposes CV-SSMNet, a physics-aware complex-valued state-space network with scattering-aware feature modulation for PolSAR image classification. The proposed method builds a complex-valued state-space model (CV-SSM) in the original complex domain to capture long-range spatial dependencies while preserving polarimetric amplitude-phase coupling. Meanwhile, seven physically meaningful scattering priors, are encoded as FiLM-style modulation signals to adaptively recalibrate complex-valued representations during feature evolution. CV-SSMNet further integrates multi-scale complex convolutions, branch-wise CV-SSM encoding, prior-guided recalibration, and lightweight global context aggregation, enabling physically guided representation learning from local scattering structures to global spatial context. Experiments on three L-band benchmark datasets and an additional P-band BIOMASS evaluation demonstrate that CV-SSMNet achieves competitive accuracy, improved regional consistency, and better boundary preservation, supporting the effectiveness of embedding polarimetric scattering mechanisms into complex-valued long-range GeoAI representation learning.
Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become popular for image classification due to their effectiveness in computer vision tasks. Now, researchers are exploring the potential of vision transformers (ViTs) in remote sensing and Earth observation. However, traditional Real-Valued networks often overlook important phase information in Complex-Valued (CV) data like polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data. To address this, new CV deep architectures have emerged. HybridCVNet, a novel hybrid network, blends CV-CNN and CV vision transformer (CV-ViT) techniques. It efficiently combines CV 3D and 2D CNNs as feature extractors, enhancing PolSAR image classification by extracting complementary information and effectively leveraging interdependencies within the data. Experimental results from widely-used PolSAR datasets show HybridCVNet outperforms other methods, achieving an overall accuracy of 97.39% on the Flevoland dataset and showing promise even with just a 1% sampling ratio, with a Kappa value of 0.972 on the San Francisco dataset. Source code is accessible through https://github.com/mqalkhatib/HybridCVNet
This paper presents DDF2Pol, a lightweight dual-domain convolutional neural network for PolSAR image classification. The proposed architecture integrates two parallel feature extraction streams, one real-valued and one complex-valued, designed to capture complementary spatial and polarimetric information from PolSAR data. To further refine the extracted features, a depth-wise convolution layer is employed for spatial enhancement, followed by a coordinate attention mechanism to focus on the most informative regions. Experimental evaluations conducted on two benchmark datasets, Flevoland and San Francisco, demonstrate that DDF2Pol achieves superior classification performance while maintaining low model complexity. Specifically, it attains an Overall Accuracy (OA) of 98.16% on the Flevoland dataset and 96.12% on the San Francisco dataset, outperforming several state-of-the-art real- and complex-valued models. With only 91,371 parameters, DDF2Pol offers a practical and efficient solution for accurate PolSAR image analysis, even when training data is limited. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/mqalkhatib/DDF2Pol
Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) classification underpins all-weather Earth observation. Conventional Wishart methods depend on rigid handcrafted operators with limited adaptability, while mainstream deep networks ignore PolSAR native Wishart scattering statistics. Additionally, fixed convolution windows fail to capture multi-scale, multi-directional terrain patterns, harming boundary detection and small-object characterization. To mitigate these drawbacks, we propose WGDNet, a Wishart-guided geometric-aware deep network. It integrates three core designs: (1) learnable Wishart convolutions with directional kernels for multi-scale statistical edge feature extraction; (2) an orientation-prior aggregation module that estimates dominant local directions and confidences to refine directional Wishart outputs adaptively; (3) GAnet, a scale-direction adaptive geometric-aware convolution that dynamically reshapes sampling grids to model anisotropic terrain and retain fine details. Our contributions lie in learnable Wishart statistical modeling, orientation-prior feature aggregation, and geometry-adaptive convolution. Evaluations across four real PolSAR datasets verify WGDNet surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches in classification accuracy and boundary fidelity.