COMPARISON OF SPECKLE REDUCTION METHODS FOR MULTISOURCE LAND-COVER CLASSIFICATION BY NEURAL NETWORK : A CASE STUDY IN THE SOUTH COAST OF KOREA

The objective of this study is to quantitatively evaluate the effects of various SAR speckle reduction methods for multisource land-cover classification by backpropagation neural network, especially over the coastal region. The land-cover classification using neural network has an advantage over conventional statistical approaches in that it is distribution-free and no prior knowledge of the statistical distributions of the classes is needed. The goal of multisource land-cover classification acquired by different sensors is to reduce the classification error, and consequently SAR can be utilized an complementary tool to optical sensors. SAR speckle is, however, an serious limiting factor when it is exploited for land-cover classification. In order to reduce this problem. we test various speckle methods including Frost, Median, Kuan and EPOS. Interpreting the weights about training pixel samples, the “Importance Value” of each SAR images that reduced speckle can be estimated based on its contribution to the classification. In this study, the “Importance Value” is used as a criterion of the effectiveness.