Classification of polarimetric SAR images of suburban areas using joint annealed segmentation and "H/A/α" decomposition

A joint segmentation-based classification technique is proposed for fully polarimetric SAR images of suburban areas. This is based on the joint use of the H/A/α_ decomposition and a multivariate annealed segmentation. This allows us to exploit the information available in the noisy estimate of the anisotropy parameter, retaining the highest possible spatial resolution. Specifically, the anisotropy is processed in conjunction with entropy and α_ angle, so that it is regularized by their more stable values. The application of the proposed technique to an AIRSAR image of suburban areas shows its practical effectiveness