Identifying Wet and Dry Snow With Dual-Polarized C-Band SAR Data Based on Markov Random Field Model

Quad-pol synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is one of the most effective approaches for dry and wet snow identification data, but its applicability is limited by the high cost of quad-pol SAR data. Dual-pol SAR such as Sentinel-1 has larger spatial coverage, longer time sequences, and freely accessible data, but there is still a highly uncertainty in dual-pol SAR to distinguish dry and wet snow due to limited polarimetric information. In this study, a pixel neighborhood-based snow identification algorithm was developed and verified using dual-pol C-band SAR data in Northern Xinjiang, China. A total of six decomposed parameters were obtained to characterize the polarimetric information of dual-pol SAR data by modifying the H- a decomposition applicable to dual-pol SAR data. In the case of limited training samples, polarimetric features that were most sensitive to snow identification were selected as the optimal features for support vector machine (SVM), and the result derived from SVM was employed as the initial labels of Markov random field (MRF) model to separate dry and wet snow using iterative conditional mode (ICM). Then, the proposed algorithm, dual-pol SVM-MRF (DSVM-MRF), was validated and compared with previously published methods. The results show that the DSVM-MRF acquires the superior snow recognition with the overall accuracy (OA) and Kappa coefficient of 84.5% and 0.58%, respectively.