Assessment of polarimetric features to discriminate land cover from the MAESTRO 1 campaign

Abstract This paper is mainly devoted to the analysis of the discrimination capability of a radar polarimeter using a purely statistical approach. The statistical analysis is intended to find the set of variates that best summarizes the dilTerences between classes. We have analysed the advantages of a fully polarimetric sensor with respect to a conventional radar that does not retain the phase relation between dilTerent polarizations. In this work, we have used the radar images acquired by the DC-8/AIRSAR over the Flevoland test site “Holland” during the MASTRO I campaign. The canonical discriminant analysis gives the best results to summarize the information content of the data and to reduce the dimension of the variables to be considered in the classification. The phase information only shows significant discrimination power when several independent samples are averaged. A good speckle reduction technique improves the classification results, even when the phase information is not taken into account.