Synergic Effect of using the Optical and Radar Image Data for the Land Cover Classification in Coastal Region

This study a imed to analyze the effect of combined optical and radar image for the land cover classification in coastal region. The study area, Gyeonggi Bay area has one of the largest tidal ranges and has frequent land cover changes due to the several reclamations and rather intensive land uses. Ten land cover types were classified using several datasets of combining Landsat ETM+ and RADARSAT imagery. The synergic effects of the merged datasets were analyzed by both visual interpretation and an ordinary supervised classification. The merged optical and SAR datasets provided better discrimination among the land cover classes in the coastal area. The overall classification accuracy of merged datasets was improved to 86.5% as compared to 78% accuracy of using ETM+ only.