Evaluation of the Pi-SAR Data for Land Cover Discrimination

The aim of this study is to evaluate the Pi-SAR data for land cover discrimination using a standard method. For this purpose, the original polarization and Pauli components of the Pi-SAR X-band and L-band data are used and the results are compared. As a method for the land cover discrimination, the traditional method of statistical maximum likelihood decision rule is selected. To increase the accuracy of the classification result, different spatial thresholds based on local knowledge are determined and used for the actual classification process. Moreover, to reduce the speckle noise and increase the spatial homogeneity of different classes of objects, a speckle suppression filter is applied to the original Pi-SAR data before applying the classification decision rule. Overall, the research indicated that the original Pi-SAR polarization components can be successfully used for separation of different land cover types without taking taking special polarization transformations.