Classification of the Yellow River delta area using fully polarimetric SAR measurements

作者：Andrea Buono, Ferdinando Nunziata, Maurizio Migliaccio, Xiaofang Yang, Xiaowen Li · 发表于：International Journal of Remote Sensing · 年份：2017 · DOI：10.1080/01431161.2017.1363437 · 被引用次数：49 · 研究领域：Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Applications and Techniques、Ocean Waves and Remote Sensing、Soil Moisture and Remote Sensing

In this study, an analysis of the polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) capabilities to classify coastal areas is undertaken. The Yellow River delta (China) is selected as the test case since it represents an extraordinary environmental and economical area, which is characterized by a very heterogeneous scattering scenario, as witnessed by official reference data, provided by the Chinese government, that classified 12 different kinds of environment. Experimental results, obtained applying two well-known unsupervised classifiers, namely the H/α-based and the Freeman–Durden model-based algorithms, to a fully polarimetric SAR scene collected by Radarsat-2 in 2008 are compared and critically discussed. Both provide a satisfactory global accuracy (larger than 60% in average) with reference to the inland Yellow River delta area, but there are subareas that result in misclassifications and severe classification ambiguities. This study also suggests including single-polarization intensity information to improve the classification accuracy and to partly solve ambiguities.