Comparison of urban areas extracted by using L-band and X-band fully polarimetric SAR images

In this paper, we compare the performance of extracting urban areas from L-band and X-band fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. For L-band SAR images, we used the method proposed by Kajimoto and Susaki [1] that combines the relation between volume scattering and total power and the polarization orientation angle (POA) randomness. For X-band SAR images, we compared two methods: the method proposed by Susaki and Kishimoto [2] and the method proposed by Esch et al. [3]. The former one replaces POA randomness used in the method by [1] with polarimetric coherence. The latter one calculates a texture index representing heterogeneity of land covers from single polarimetric SAR image. The validation results show that the accuracy for extracting urban areas depends on the heterogeneity of urban and vegetation areas.