Impervious surfaces estimation using dual-polarimetric SAR and optical data

Abstract

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data has been reported to be able to provide complementary information towards optical remote sensing data for improving the urban impervious surface estimation. However, most existing researches were focused on using only single polarization SAR data. This study presents a preliminary experiment on the combined use of multispectral optical data and dual polarization SAR data for impervious surfaces estimation. Experimental results using SPOT-5 and ALOS PALSAR images showed a consistent result compared with our previous result using single polarization SAR data. Comparison results showed that not every polarimetric feature was able to provide positive effect to the impervious surfaces estimation. Compared with using only optical and SAR data, the separated HH and HV polarization data provided a positive effect to the result by improving the accuracy. The incorporation of both Entropy and Alpha features were also able to improve the accuracy. However, the HH/HV ratio and the separated use of Entropy did not provide positive results. A combination of all the features turned out to obtain the highest accuracy compared with using a subset of the features.