Detecting and Downscaling Wet Areas on Boreal Landscapes

This letter presents an approach to classify wet areas from European Remote Sensing 2 (ERS-2) synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-, Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM)-, and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)-derived terrain data and downscale the result from the coarse resolution of satellite images to finer resolutions needed for land managers. Using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and support vector machines (SVM), the algorithm finds multiple relationships between the radar, optical, and terrain data and wet areas at different spatial scales. Decomposing and reconstructing processes are performed using a 2-D DWT (2D-DWT) and inverse 2D-DWT respectively. The underlying relationships between radar, optical, and terrain data and wet areas are learned by training an SVM at the coarse resolution of the wet-area map. The SVM is then applied on the predictors at a finer resolution to produce wet-area detailing images, which are needed to reconstruct a finer resolution wet-area map. The algorithm is applied to a boreal landscape in northern Alberta, Canada, characterized by many wet-area features including ephemeral and permanent streams and wetlands.