Analysis of Relationships between Features Extracted from SAR Data and Land-cover Classes

This paper analyzed relationships between various features from SAR data with multiple acquisition dates and mode (frequency, polarization and incidence angles), and land-cover classes. Two typical types of features were extracted by considering acquisition conditions of currently available SAR data. First, coherence, temporal variability and principal component transform-based features were extracted from multi-temporal and single mode SAR data. C-band ERS-1/2, ENVISAT ASAR and Radarsat-1, and L-band JERS-1 SAR data were used for those features and different characteristics of different SAR sensor data were discussed in terms of land-cover discrimination capability. Overall, tandem coherence showed the best discrimination capability among various features. Long-term coherence from C-band SAR data provided a useful information on the discrimination of urban areas from other classes. Paddy fields showed the highest temporal variability values in all SAR sensor data. Features from principal component transform contained particular information relevant to specific land-cover class. As features for multiple mode SAR data acquired at similar dates, polarization ratio and multi-channel variability were also considered. VH/VV polarization ratio was a useful feature for the discrimination of forest and dry fields in which the distributions of coherence and temporal variability were significantly overlapped. It would be expected that the case study results could be useful information on improvement of classification accuracy in land-cover classification with SAR data, provided that the main findings of this paper would be confirmed by extensive case studies based on multi-temporal SAR data with various modes and ground-based SAR experiments.