ALOS/PALSAR Data Evaluation for Land Use and Land Cover Mapping in the Amazon Region

In tropical biomes such as the Amazon, the cloud cover is frequent. The use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor systems is important to monitor and study these biomes because they can acquire data under cloud coverage. In this paper, an advanced land observing system phased array L-band synthetic aperture radar fine-beam dual (ALOS/PALSAR-FBD) image was evaluated for land use and land cover (LULC) classification of an Amazon test site. The features extracted from this image were also evaluated. To perform this task, a method for feature selection, considering the desired classes, was proposed. In order to better understand the applicability of this type of data in Brazilian Government projects (such as DETER-B and TerraClass), the results obtained with SAR images were compared with those from LANDSAT5/TM. The results show that the PALSAR-FBD image and the features selected are not suitable for the discrimination of densely forested classes. They presented, however, a good discrimination among the group of forested and agropastoral classes, as well as among nondensely forested classes (i.e., pastures, bare soil, and new regeneration). Therefore, these data present good applicability for mapping and monitoring of both deforestation and LULC and they can be used in the above mentioned projects. The classification of selected features, with eight classes of interest, achieved an increase of about 133% and 69% in the Kappa index (0.32) and an Overall Accuracy (0.54) regarding the PALSAR-FBD classification (0.136 and 0.322, respectively). This result shows the applicability of the proposed method. It is also expected that the features selected in this paper will improve the classification of similar study sites.