WGDnet: Wishart-guided Geometric-aware Deep Network for PolSAR Image Classification

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.

Junfei Shi, Haojia Zhang, Yu Cheng, Yuke Li · 2026