Application of a new polarimetric filter to RADARSAT-2 data of deception island (Antarctic peninsula region) for surface cover characterization

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a new approach to analyse and quantify land surface covers on Deception Island, a volcanic island located in the Northern Antarctic Peninsula region by means of fully polarimetric RADARSAT-2 (C-Band) SAR image. Data have been filtered by a new polarimetric speckle filter (PolSAR-BLF) that is based on the bilateral filter. This filter is locally adapted to the spatial structure of the image by relying on pixel similarities in both the spatial and the radiometric domains. Thereafter different polarimetric features have been extracted and selected before being geocoded. These polarimetric parameters serve as a basis for a supervised classification using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Finally, a map of landform is generated based on the result of the SVM results.