Unsupervised Hierarchical Land Classification Using Self-Organizing Feature Codebook for Decimeter-Resolution PolSAR

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a hierarchical polarization feature generation using a self-organizing codebook to realize unsupervised land classification that fully utilizes the detailed polarization information contained in high-resolution polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data. PolSAR has reached a decimeter-level high resolution. In general, conventional methods lower the resolution of the PolSAR data to 10–20 m in the real-space distance to classify observation regions into land classes such as farm, forest, and town. However, lowering resolution prevents us from discovering new land classes potentially enabled by the resolution enhancement. The hierarchical method we propose here not only classifies observation regions successfully into land classes such as farm, forest, and town that humans can naturally distinguish but also discovers new land subclasses findable only in high-resolution PolSAR data. We explain these two types of our achievements (classification/discovery) through experimental results for Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s polarimetric and interferometric airborne SAR-L2 data having decimeter resolution.