Synergetic Use of Descending and Ascending SAR with Optical Data for Impervious Surface Mapping

Synergetic use of both Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and optical data has been applied for mapping impervious surface (IS) in recent years. However, researchers use only descending or ascending SAR to cooperate with optical data, which cannot avoid the problems caused by side looking of SAR, including layover and SAR shadow. This research explored and analyzed the impact of mapping IS by cooperating descending, ascending SAR and both of them with optical data respectively. To obtain a credible result, support vector machine (SVM) is employed to conduct the classification. The results indicated that the combined use of both descending and ascending SAR with optical data achieved the highest accuracy on IS mapping.