ASSESSMENT OF FULL AND COMPACT POLARIMETRIC SAR OBSERVATIONS FOR LAND-COVER AND CROP CLASSIFICATION

摘要

The recently developed compact polarimetric (CP) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data tend to confer a valuable source of information -comparable to full polarimetric (FP) data- in many applications. However, this assertion still needs confirmation in practice. This paper evaluates the potential of FP and CP data in land-cover and crop classification and determines the prospects of CP data in such applications. To this end, two data sets including full polarimetric L-band data from UAVSAR, acquired over an agricultural area in Winnipeg (Canada), and full polarimetric C-band data acquired by RADARSAT-2 over San Francisco are used. CP data are simulated from the FP data of the both datasets and classified by the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm. Based on the results, CP system with a simpler design compared to FP system still has the potential to be used as an alternative when a larger swath width is required.