Complex Contourlet-CNN for Polarimetric SAR Image Classification

•A novel complex CNN is constructed, in which the operation rules of convolutional layer, subsampling layer, normalization layer, fully-connected layer and activation function are redefined in complex field.•Based on the proposed complex CNN, the multiscale deep Contourlet filter banks are constructed in order to extract robust discriminative features with multidirection, multiscale, and multiresolution properties.•The proposed complex Contourlet-CNN is successfully applied for PolSAR image classification.