Classification of dual- and single polarized SAR images by incorporating visual features

Fully and partially polarimetric SAR data in combination with textural features have been used extensively for terrain classification. However, there is another type of visual feature that has so far been neglected from polarimetric SAR classification: Color. It is a common practice to visualize polarimetric SAR data by color coding methods and thus it is possible to extract powerful color features from such pseudo color images so as to gather additional crucial information for an improved terrain classification. In this paper, we investigate the application of several individual visual features over different pseudo color generated images along with the traditional SAR and texture features for a novel supervised classification application of dual- and single-polarized SAR data. We then draw the focus on evaluating the effects of the applied pseudo coloring methods on the classification performance. An extensive set of experiments show that individual visual features or their combination with traditional SAR features introduce a new level of discrimination and provide noteworthy improvement of classification accuracies within the application of land use and land cover classification for dual- and single-pol image data.