Polarimetric SAR images classification based on L distribution and spatial context

Abstract

To obtain accurate classification results of polarimetric SAR images in different heterogeneity areas, a novel unsupervised classification method is proposed, which combines an advanced distribution with spatial contextual information based on stochastic expectation maximization (SEM) algorithm. Specifically, the probabilities of class membership are calculated by L distribution, and a neighborhood function is defined to describe spatial contextual information. Then the probabilities of class membership are altered by the predefined neighborhood function via probabilistic label relaxation (PLR) technique. Moreover, RADARSAT-2 and EMISAR data are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experiment results show it can accurately classify different heterogeneity areas and obtain more consistent results compared with other algorithms.