Young Scientist Award from URSI to Ajeet Kumar

We are glad to announce that our researcher, Ajeet Kumar, received the Young Scientist Award (YSA) from the International Union of Radio Science / Union Radio-Scientifique Internationale (URSI). This prestigious award recognizes individuals who have made innovative contributions and discoveries in multidisciplinary research related to electromagnetic fields and waves.

Dr. Kumar received his award during the ceremony held at one of the URSI Flagship meetings, AT-RASC 2024, in Gran Canaria, Spain.
During this conference meeting, he presented an impressive piece of work from our CNIT RaSS Laboratory entitled   “Closed-form Solution for Accurate Estimation of |sₕᵥ|²  in Hybrid-Polarimetry SAR for Oil Spill Monitoring“. The mathematical formulation presented in this work makes it possible, for the first time, to derive a closed-form solution of  |sₕᵥ|², which was declared indeterminate in the past without the use of iteration or approximation. This work can help in efficiently utilizing ongoing and future hybrid-pol SAR-based satellite missions, such as NISAR (NASA-ISRO joint mission), the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (Canadian mission), and ALOS-2 (Japanese mission), for various important applications. Further descriptions of the presented work are as follows:

Abstract:

In the existing literature, the linear cross-polarization term, i.e. |sₕᵥ|², is often considered a lost parameter in hybrid-polarimetry (hybrid-pol) SAR. This hypothesis arose from the recognition that, even when taking into account the reflection-symmetry condition (which is nearly valid for all types of natural surfaces), there are five parameters required to compute |sₕᵥ|², whereas Hybrid-pol SAR can only acquire four parameters, resulting in an underdetermined solution. We respectfully hold a different perspective from the earlier statements and would like to clarify that utilizing four parameters instead of five is indeed adequate for the precise calculation of |sₕᵥ|². Consequently, we have established a mathematical relationship under the reflection symmetry condition that provides a closed-form solution for calculating |sₕᵥ|² from hybrid-pol SAR datasets. For validation, both theoretical and practical assessments have been conducted, with the implementation of compound scattering matrices-based analysis and the real Satellite ALOS PALSAR L-band dataset.

Contributing Authors:

1. RaSS National Laboratory, National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT), Pisa, Italy, ajeet.kumar@cnit.it
2. Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India, rajib.panigrahi@ece.iitr.ac.in
   
3. University of Birmingham, UK,  marco.martorella@cnit.it

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