Classification of Chinese GaoFen-3 fully-polarimetric SAR images: Initial results

Abstract

Last year, China has launched a new radar satellite on August 10th: the Chinese high spatial resolution satellite Gaofen-3 (GF-3). It is the first Chinese polarimetric imaging radar, and the only radar satellite in the Chinese High Resolution Earth Observation System. This paper introduces two fully-polarimetric (FP) modes of GF-3, and exhibits their calibrated backscattering coefficients and land classification results. The histograms of GF-3 calibrated backscattering coefficients are in good accordance with those of Radatsat-2 Fine Quad data. Besides, both unsupervised and supervised classification schemes portrait different ground objects in a rational way, and achieve satisfactory accuracies. Through the comparison to Radarsat-2 data, both backscattering information and polarimetric abilities of GF-3 are examined, which demonstrate good product quality and utilization value of GF-3.