Land use and cover classification of Sentinel-IA SAR imagery: A case study of Istanbul

Abstract

In this study, Sentinel-1A SAR imagery for land use/cover classification and its impacts on classification algorithms were addressed. Sentinel-1A imagery has dual polarization (VV and VH) and freely available from ESA. Istanbul was selected as the study region. After the pre-processing steps including the applying the precise orbit file, calibration, multilooking, speckle filtering and terrain correction, the imagery was classified as the following step. Three classification algorithms (SVM, RF and K-NN) were implemented and the impacts of additional bands (VV-VH, VV+VH etc.) were investigated. Results demonstrated that highest classification accuracy of this study was obtained by SVM classification with the original bands (VV and VH) of Sentinel-1A imagery. Moreover, it was concluded that additional bands had different impacts on each classifier within accuracy.