International Journal of
Physical Sciences

  • Abbreviation: Int. J. Phys. Sci.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN: 1992-1950
  • DOI: 10.5897/IJPS
  • Start Year: 2006
  • Published Articles: 2578

Full Length Research Paper

Polarization synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data for mapping coastal zone vegetation

Maged Marghany*, Noradilawaty Zabidi, Wan Hazli Wan Kadir and Mazlan Hashim
Institute of Geospatial Science and Technology (INSTeG), UniversitiTeknologi Malaysia, 81310 UTM, Skudai, Johor Bahru, Malaysia.
Email: [email protected], [email protected]

  •  Accepted: 06 October 2011
  •  Published: 16 November 2011

Abstract

 

Coastal vegetation is one of the important natural ecosystems that act as protection from sea wave erosion phenomena and supply oxygen to the surrounding organisms. POLSAR data with multi-band and multi-polarization is selected for these studies which are acquired on September 19, 2000, for coastal vegetation mapping. Two methods are performed to CVV, LHH and LHV bands: Polarization signature analysis and comparison of classification between two clustering techniques (Fuzzy-k-mean and iterative self organizing data analysis technique, ISODATA). The result shows that L band with HV polarization can distinguish coastal vegetation better than CVV. Furthermore, classification result of LHH and LHV show that the Fuzzy-k-mean clustering provided accuracy of 76% moreover with the kappa statistic of 70%.

 

Key words: Polarization synthetic aperture radar (POLSAR), coastal vegetation, polarization signature, fuzzy-k-mean, iterative self organizing data analysis technique (ISODATA).

Abbreviation

ATI, Along-track interferometric; RSO, rectified skew orthomorphic; SSI, speckle suppression index; PI, polarization indices.