POLARIMETRIC SAR DATA GMM CLASSIFICATION BASED ON IMPROVED FREEMAN INCOHERENT DECOMPOSITION

Abstract. Due to the increasing volume of available SAR Data, powerful classification processings are needed to interpret the images. GMM (Gaussian Mixture Model) is widely used to model distributions. In most applications, GMM algorithm is directly applied on raw SAR data, its disadvantage is that forest and urban areas are classified with the same label and gives problems in interpretation. In this paper, a combination between the improved Freeman decomposition and GMM classification is proposed. The improved Freeman decomposition powers are used as feature vectors for GMM classification. The E-SAR polarimetric image acquired over Oberpfaffenhofen in Germany is used as data set. The result shows that the proposed combination can solve the standard GMM classification problem.