RS navigation buttons

Fusion of Airborne Polarimetric and Interferometric SAR For Classification of Coastal Environments

Melba M. Crawford, Member, IEEE,
Shailesh Kumar, Student Member, IEEE,
Michael R. Ricard, Student Member, IEEE,
James C. Gibeaut, and Amy Neuenschwander

Center for Space Research, University of Texas at Austin
3925 W. Braker Ln., Suite 200, Austin, TX 78759-5321
Ph: (512) 471-5573  Fax: (512) 471-3570
E-mail: crawford@csr.utexas.edu

ABSTRACT

AIRSAR and TOPSAR data were acquired over the wetlands of Bolivar Peninsula along the Gulf coast of Texas for mapping land cover types and topographic features such as beach ridges, dunes, and relict storm features. Classification of land cover over this wetlands and uplands environment is difficult because of the similarity of spectral signatures of the vegetation types. In addition, because the distribution of vegetation communities in coastal marshes is strongly related to salinity, which in turn is largely dictated by frequency and duration of inundation, surface topography is critical to determination of the vegetation characteristics at any location. The potential advantages of multisensor classification, including, in particular, topographic information from a TOPSAR DEM are investigated. An approach which employs a class dependent feature selection procedure in conjunction with pairwise Bayesian classifiers is proposed and applied to the polarimetric and interferometric SAR data.

Buttons

Last Modified: Tue July 13, 1999
CSR/TSGC Team Web

../