An improved land cover classification using polarization signatures for PALSAR 2 data

Abstract

Land cover classification in mixed land cover scenarios is challenging with PolSAR data. Polarimetric decomposition techniques are most popular methods for PolSAR data classification in recent times. These techniques focus on identification of dominant scattering phenomena and hence result in sub-optimal classification in mixed land cover scenarios. Alternatively, polarization signatures (PSs) are good illustrations of SAR target responses as they depict a detailed physical information from target backscatter. Researchers have successfully utilized SAR PSs for land cover (LC) classification. Some reports suggested utilizing correlation between observed PSs and standard target PSs as features for LC classification. This paper presents a study on improved utilization of PSs for optimal LC classification in mixed class scenarios. First, PS based SAR features are derived using fully polarimetric SAR data. The features represent a degree of similarity between observed and standard PSs. The derived features are termed as polarization signatures correlation features or PSCFs. The novel PSCFs are analyzed, evaluated and compared with decomposition based features for the purpose of LC classification. Classification performance indicators highlight potential of PSCFs for mixed LC classification problems. Therefore, further an adaptive and optimal LC class boundary estimation approach for LC classification is proposed and developed. Observed PSs and reference LC class PS statistics are used to build empirical models between classification performance indicators and LC class boundaries. The empirical models are optimized using the evolutionary genetic algorithm to maximize classification performance. A decision tree is constructed based on the optimal class boundaries to prepare LC classification. The proposed classification approach is compared with some recent popular classifiers and comparison suggests that the proposed approach provides satisfactory results for mixed LC classification scenarios.