Innovative Polarimetric Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar Land Cover Classification: Integrating Power, Polarimetric, and Interferometric Information for Higher Accuracy

The Polarimetric Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolInSAR) system is a combination of polarimetric SAR and interferometric SAR, which can simultaneously obtain the power information, polarimetric information, and interferometric information of land cover. Traditional land cover classification methods fail to fully utilize these information types, resulting in limited classification types and low accuracy. This paper proposes a PolInSAR land cover classification method that fuses power information, polarimetric information, and interferometric information, aiming to enrich the classification types and improve the classification accuracy. Firstly, the land cover is divided into strong scattering areas and weak scattering areas by using the power information to avoid the influence of weak scattering areas on the classification results. Then, the weak scattering areas are distinguished into shadows and water bodies by combining the interferometric information and image corners. For the strong scattering areas, the polarimetric information is utilized to distinguish vegetation, buildings, and bare soil. For the vegetation area, the concept of vegetation ground elevation is put forward. By combining with the anisotropy parameter, the vegetation is further subdivided into tall coniferous vegetation, short coniferous vegetation, tall broad-leaved vegetation, and short broad-leaved vegetation. The effectiveness of the method has been verified by the PolInSAR data obtained from the N-SAR system developed by Nanjing Research Institute of Electronics Technology. The overall classification accuracy reaches 90.2%, and the Kappa coefficient is 0.876.