Multi-frequency polarimetric snow discrimination in Alpine areas

This paper presents a new method to map dry snow in Alpine areas. A supervised discrimination algorithm, based on polarimetric contrast, is proposed to enhance multi-temporal and/or multi-frequency polarimetric behavior variations over snow-covered areas. This technique is shown to be more robust with respect to topography and underlying media diversity than classical contrast enhancement approaches. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated using SIR-C L and C-band polarimetric data sets