Integration of multitemporal/polarization C‐band SAR data sets for land‐cover classification

Abstract

This paper investigates the potential of multitemporal/polarization C‐band SAR data for land‐cover classification. Multitemporal Radarsat‐1 data with HH polarization and ENVISAT ASAR data with VV polarization acquired in the Yedang plain, Korea are used for the classification of typical five land‐cover classes in an agricultural area. The presented methodologies consist of two analytical stages: one for feature extraction and the other for classification based on the combination of features. Both a traditional SAR signal property analysis‐based approach and principal‐component analysis (PCA) are applied in the feature extraction stage. Special concerns are in the interpretation of each principal component by using principal‐component loading. The tau model applied as a decision‐level fusion methodology can provide a formal framework in which the posteriori probabilities derived from different sensor data can be combined. From the case study results, the combination of PCA‐based features showed improved classification accuracy for both Radarsat‐1 and ENVISAT ASAR data, as compared with the traditional SAR signal property analysis‐based approach. The integration of PCA‐based features based on multiple polarization (i.e. HH from Radarsat‐1, and both VV and VH from ENVISAT ASAR) and different incidence angles contributed to a significant improvement of discrimination capability for dry fields which could not be properly classified by using only Radarsat‐1 or ENVISAT ASAR data, and thus showed the best classification accuracy. The results of this case study indicate that the use of multiple polarization SAR data with a proper feature extraction stage would improve classification accuracy in multitemporal SAR data classification, although further consideration should be given to the polarization and incidence angle dependency of complex land‐cover classes through more experiments.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the internal research project of the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources, and in part by the Korea Research Council of Public Science and Technology. Three images among the ENVISAT ASAR data set used in this study were kindly provided by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), Korea. We thank Professor Hoonyol Lee from the Kangwon National University, Korea for his valuable comments on coherence image generation and interpretation. Constructive comments and suggestions by two anonymous reviewers also helped us improve the presentation of this paper.