Extracting impervious surfaces from full polarimetric SAR images in different urban areas

Accurate mapping of impervious surface in urban areas is of great demand in environmental and socio-economic studies since impervious surface growth is recognized as an indicator of urbanization. To demonstrate the potential of full polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) in impervious surface detection in different urban areas, this study focused on the exploitation of only SAR data. Three cities with different levels of urbanization - Tehran, Kordkuy, and Arak - have been selected to reduce the effect of input data on achieved results. Advanced Land Observing Satellite/Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (ALOS/PALSAR) images have been classified by support vector machine (SVM) with the help of training data from high-resolution satellite images. Quantitative assessment of classification accuracy revealed that Kordkuy, a not fully developed city (i.e. 84.2%) has the lowest accuracy and Arak, a medium urbanized city, has the highest accuracy (i.e. 90.0%). To further explore the efficiency of full polarimetric SAR, grey level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) texture of polarized bands has been extracted and put into the classification procedure. The texture information of SAR data provided positive contribution to the impervious surface estimation in three study cases. The improvement is especially noted in dark impervious surface class. All three study areas show an increase of about 6-8% in classification accuracy. The results prove that single use of full polarimetric SAR images holds high potential in identifying impervious surfaces in urban areas. The findings are of great importance in frequent urban impervious surface mapping and monitoring especially in cloud-prone area, where the use of optical data as well as the fusion of optic and SAR data are limited.