A case study of land cover classification using combined PolSAR and optical

A land use and land cover (LULC) map is primitive information in many application fields as the geospatial information, and this is able to be contributed by the Earth observation satellite data in both local scale and global scale. Recently, much finer resolution (~10 m spatial resolution) of LULC map is demanded from users to contribute in the application fields i.e. agriculture, forest management, costal environmental monitoring, an illegal exploitation and waste dumping, as well as in the scientific field i.e. forest biomass estimation, climatology, energy and water cycle studies. These application and scientific issues are not only in Japan but also in foreign countries. This paper investigated relationships between microwave and optical responses in several land-cover-conditions to develop a combined LULC algorithm as preliminary study.