Improvement of Land Cover / Land Use Classification by Combination of Optical and Microwave Remote Sensing Data

Optical and microwave remote sensing data have been widely used in land cover and land use classification. Thanks to the spectral absorption characteristics of ground object in visible and near infrared region, optical data enables to extract different land cover types according to their material composition like water body, vegetation cover or bare land. On the other hand, microwave sensor receives backscatter radiance which contains information on surface roughness, object density and their 3-D structure that are very important complementary information to interpret land use and land cover. Separate use of these data have brought many successful results in practice. However, the accuracy of the land use / land cover established by this methodology still has some problems. One of the way to improve accuracy of the land use / land cover classification is just combination of both optical and microwave data in analysis. In this paper for the research, the author used LANDSAT TM scene 127/45 acquired on October 21, 1992, JERS-1 SAR scene 119/265 acquired on October 27, 1992 and aerial photographs taken on October 21, 1992. The study area has been selected in Hanoi City and surrounding area, Vietnam. This is a flat agricultural area with various land use types as water rice, secondary crops like maize, cassava, vegetables cultivation as cucumber, tomato etc. mixed with human settlement and some manufacture facilities as brick and ceramic factories. The use of only optical or microwave data could result in misclassification among some land use features as settlement and vegetables cultivation using frame stages. By combination of multitemporal JERS-1 SAR and TM data these errors have been eliminated so that accuracy of the final land use / land cover map has been improved. The paper describes a methodology for data combination and presents results achieved by the proposed approach.