Land-Cover Mapping Using Airborne Polarimetric SAR

The potential of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) for land-cover mapping applications has since long time been recognized. The main advantage of the SAR is its all-weather mapping capability, which secures the mapping independent of cloud cover that may prevent acquisition by optical and infrared sensors. Furthermore, the backscattering of the radar waves is sensitive to the dielectric properties of the vegetation and the soil, to the plant structure (i.e. the size, shape and orientation distributions of the scatterers), to the surface roughness, and to the canopy structure (e.g. row direction and spacing, and cover fraction) [1]. It is well known, for instance, that the canopy development of different crops as a function of time causes changes of the backscatter, and it is the basis for e.g. multitemporal classification of ERS SAR data [2].