• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.52 no.4
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• pp.313-322
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• 2019

SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) remote sensing data is a very useful tool for near-real-time identification of landslide affected areas that can occur over a large area due to heavy rains or typhoons. This study aims to develop an effective algorithm for automatically delineating landslide areas from the polarimetric SAR data acquired after the landslide event. To detect landslides from SAR observations, reduction of the speckle effects in the estimation of polarimetric SAR parameters and the orthorectification of geometric distortions on sloping terrain are essential processing steps. Based on the experimental analysis, it was found that the IDAN filter can provide a better estimation of the polarimetric parameters. In addition, it was appropriate to apply orthorectification process after estimating polarimetric parameters in the slant range domain. Furthermore, it was found that the polarimetric entropy is the most appropriate parameters among various polarimetric parameters. Based on those analyses, we proposed an automatic landslide detection algorithm using the histogram thresholding of the polarimetric parameters with the aid of terrain slope information. The landslide detection algorithm was applied to the ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 data which observed landslide areas in Japan triggered by Typhoon in September 2011. Experimental results showed that the landslide areas were successfully identified by using the proposed algorithm with a detection rate of about 82% and a false alarm rate of about 3%.