![Sample our Earth Sciences journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5930/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Earth-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
Various land use/cover types exhibit seasonal characteristics which can be captured in remotely sensed imagery. This study examined how different seasons of Radarsat-2 data influence land use/cover classification accuracies for two study sites. Two dates of Radarsat-2 C-band quad-polarised images were obtained for Washington, DC, USA and Wad Madani, Sudan. Spectral signatures were extracted and used with a maximum likelihood decision rule for classification and thematic accuracies were then determined. Both despeckled radar and derived texture measures were examined. Thematic accuracies for the two despeckled image dates were similar with a difference of 3% for Washington and 6% for Sudan. Merging the despeckled images for both seasons increased overall accuracy by 2% for Washington and 9% for Sudan. Further combining the original radar for both seasons with derived texture measures increased overall accuracies by 9% for Washington and 16% for Sudan for final overall accuracy values of 73 and 82%.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the following organizations for providing and/or funding the imagery used and for supporting this research. Radarsat-2 images were provided by the Canadian Space Agency under project 3126 of the Science and Operational Application Research for RADARSAT-2 programme. The NASA Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center at the USGS/Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center provided the ASTER imagery. Finally, additional support was provided through grants received by the Department of Geography and Geoinformation Science at George Mason University.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.