Unsupervised Classification of Polarimetric SAR Images based on Fuzzy Set Theory

Inhalt:
In this letter, a new method is proposed for unsupervised classification of terrain types and man-made objects using POLarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (POLSAR) data. This technique is a combination of the usage of polarimetric information of SAR images and the unsupervised classification method based on fuzzy set theory. Image quantization and image enhancement are used to preprocess the POLSAR data. Then the polarimetric information and Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering algorithm are used to classify the preprocessed images. The advantages of this algorithm are the automated classification, high classification accuracy, fast convergence and high stability. The effectiveness of this algorithm is demonstrated by experiments using SIR-C/X-SAR (Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar) data.