ASSESSMENT OF POLARIMETRIC FEATURES TO DISCRIMINATE LAND-COVER FROM THE MAESTRO-1 CAMPAIGN

This paper is mainly devoted to the analysis of the discrimination cap ability of a radar polarimeter using a purely statistical approach. Th e statistical analysis is intended to find the set of variates that be st summarizes the differences between classes. We have analysed the ad vantages of a fully polarimetric sensor with respect to a conventional radar that does not retain the phase relation between different polar izations. In this work, we have used the radar images acquired by the DC-8/AIRSAR over the Flevoland test site (Holland) during the MASTRO 1 campaign. The canonical discriminant analysis gives the best results to summarize the information content of the data and to reduce the dim ension of the variables to be considered in the classification. The ph ase information only shows significant discrimination power when sever al independent samples are averaged. A good speckle reduction techniqu e improves the classification results, even when the phase information is not taken into account.