Parallel coordinate plot analysis of polarimetric NASA/JPL AIRSAR imagery

Polarimetric NASA/JPL AIRSAR data is processed down to three complex quantities corresponding to the HH, HV, and VV polarizations when reciprocity is assumed. Phase angles are referenced to the HH phase angle resulting in five independent quantities. In the NASA SAR Search and Rescue Mission it is important to know how light plane crash sites may stand out from the background in either the original five-dimensional space or in some derived feature space. Parallel coordinate plots are an important tool for performing exploratory data analysis in higher dimensional spaces. In this paper we employ this technique to analyze both different clutter/background types and perform detailed analysis of particular crash sites.