Built-up Area Extraction from PolSAR Imagery with Model-Based Decomposition and Polarimetric Coherence

Built-up area extraction from polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) imagery has a close relationship with urban planning, disaster management, etc. Since the buildings have complex geometries and may be misclassified as forests due to the significant cross-polarized scattering, built-up area extraction from PolSAR data is still a challenging problem. This paper proposes a new urban extraction method for PolSAR data. First, a multiple-component model-based decomposition method, which was previously proposed by us, is applied to detect the urban areas using the scattering powers. Second, with the sub-aperture decomposition, a new average polarimetric coherence coefficient ratio is proposed to discriminate the urban and natural areas. Finally, these two preliminary detection results are fused on the decision level to improve the overall detection accuracy. We validate our method using one dataset acquired with the Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) system. Experimental results demonstrate that the decomposed scattering powers and the proposed polarimetric coherence coefficient ratio are both capable of distinguishing urban areas from natural areas with accuracy about 83.1% and 80.1%, respectively. The overall detection accuracy can further increase to 86.9% with the fusion of two detection results.