An approach to monitor river catchment with PAL SAR satellite data

One of the main application of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data is developing the monitoring system for various applications like land cover and land use dynamics, vegetation mapping, canopy characterization and natural hazards by discriminating the change areas between two different dates images. In this paper, KLT (Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi) tracker has been applied on two different dated (i.e. April, 2010 and April, 2011) ALOS PALSAR (Advanced Land Observing Satellite Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar) fully polarimetric data for tracking the Solani River (nearby Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India) and the changes have been observed by applying change detection techniques. Image differencing and image ratioing have been used to classify the temporal changes in Solani River as `change' and `no change' pixels on the basis of individual tracked pixel and spatial analysis of pixels.