Classification of Earth terrain using polarimetric synthetic aperture radar images

Abstract

Classification can now be applied to fully polarimetric data which have become available due to recent developments in radar technology. Supervised and unsupervised classification techniques are applied to San Francisco Bay and Traverse City Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. For the former the Bayes technique is used to classify fully polarimetric and normalized polarimetric SAR data. Absolute and normalized magnitude response of the individual receiver channel returns, in addition to the phase difference between the receiver channels, are also considered. An unsupervised technique is based on comparing general properties of the Stokes parameters of the scattered wave to that of simple scattering models. -from Authors