Evaluation of the potential of ASAR data to estimate impervious surface area

Abstract

Estimation of impervious surface area (ISA) from satellite images is crucial towards many environmental issues. However, many difficulties remain to be addressed, especially in cloudy areas. In this article, the potential of Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) data is evaluated for mapping ISA. First, the spectral mixture analysis is employed to estimate ISA from Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) image. Second, the ISA is extracted from ASAR data according to the characteristics of synthetic aperture radar. Third, a decision fusion is used to fuse the results from ETM+ and ASAR images. Accuracy assessment shows that by just using ASAR image, the accuracy (overall accuracy: 0.6815; kappa coefficient: 0.3557) is lower than that using only ETM+ image (overall accuracy: 0.7450; kappa coefficient: 0.4806). However, the fused result (overall accuracy: 0.7612; kappa coefficient: 0.5159) gives a better accuracy than using single data source, indicating that ASAR data are able to provide complementary information on ISA, since microwave works on all-weather conditions. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.