Application of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar interferometry for land cover classification

Abstract

The development of radar polarimetry and radar interferometry is advancing rapidly. The textural fine structure, target orientation, system metrics and material constituents can be recovered with radar polarimetry; while with radar interferometry, the elevation structure of a target can be explored. Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar interferometric (Pol-InSAR) is interferometry between all possible polarization channels at each end of the baseline. Using polarimetric interferometry, the combination of the final structure properties and the spatial information of targets can be implemented. In this paper, we investigate the application of these three approaches to Earth terrain classification with results from the evaluation of fully polarimetric interferometric SIR-C/X-SAR data. The potential of Pol-InSAR for land cover classification has been demonstrated.