Improved Water Classification Using an Application-oriented Processing of Landsat ETM+ and ALOS PALSAR

Abstract

The aim of this study is to extract water body using the integrated features of Landsat ETM+ and ALOS PALSAR data. Water body extracted from Landsat ETM+ tends to lose smaller water bodies like small rivers and ponds. Besides, water area with plant (lotus) is difficult to recognize. ALOS PALSAR data have a much higher resolution, capable of extracting almost all the water bodies without confusion with other surface features, but leave some holes in water bodies due to its speckles. As a consequence, there is a significant interest in the development of fusion methods that are able to take advantage of the complementary nature of Landsat ETM+ and ALOS PALSAR data. A new combination method of integrating band 3, band 7 of Landsat ETM+ with a modified HH polarization of ALOS PALSAR is proposed, which well combine the complementary water information from each source compared to the standard image fusion methods. Experimental outcomes of the proposed combination B37ModHH shows great enhancement in water classification accuracy compared to Landsat ETM+ and ALOS PALSAR alone.