The use of multitemporal ERS-1 SLC data for landuse classification

During the commissioning phase of ERS-1 28 single-look-complex (SLC) scenes were taken of the Freiburg testsite (app. 50 km²) in the time period between Aug. 17th and Nov. 30th 1991. The scenes were converted to greyvalue images, speckle reduced using a Lee-filter and geometrically matched. A maximum-likelihood-classification of the testsite was carried out. The landuse classes were compared with a digital landuse map resulting from the 1991 ground data collection. As can be expected speckle still influences the classification results. To overcome this problem the classification results has been fit to the digital field boundary map. This enabled a fieldwise post-classification using the majority rule, which considerably improved the result of the multitemporal landuse classification