Land cover classification comparisons among dual polarimetric, pseudo-fully polarimetric, and fully polarimetric SAR imagery

In this paper, an approach is proposed that predicts fully polarimetric data from dual polarimetric data, and then applies selected supervised algorithm for dual polarimetric, pseudo-fully polarimetric and fully polarimetric dataset for the land cover classification comparison. A regression model has been developed to predict the complex variables of VV polarimetric component and amplitude independently using corresponding complex variables and amplitude in HH and HV bands. Support vector machine (SVM)is implemented for the land cover classification. Coherency matrix and amplitude were used for all dataset for the land cover classification independently.They are used to compare the data from different perspective. Finally, a post processing technique is implemented to remove the isolated pixels appeared as a noise. AVNIR-2 optical data over the same area is used as ground truth data to access the classification accuracy.The result from SVM indicates that the fully polarimetric mode gives the maximum classification accuracy followed by pseudo-fully polarimetric and dual polarimetric datasets using coherency matrix input for fully polarimetric image and pseudo-fully polarimetric image and covariance matrix input for dual polarimetric image. Additionally, it is observed that pseudo-fully polarimetric image with amplitude input does not show the significant improvement over dual polarimetric image with same input.