Road Detection in a Forest Using Sentinel-1 and FBR Time-Series Speckle Filtering

Temporal and spatial information is exploited in order to improve road detection performance in a forested area. Speckle is filtered using an FBR-based SAR time-series speckle filter, thus preserving temporal information. The additional spatial information is provided by the ascending and descending directions of acquisition of the satellite. Instead of a detection being made if the pixel value is lower than the threshold, we require the threshold to be met for every date in the time-series, and from both directions at once. This corresponds to both a temporal and spatial (generally East-West) stability requirements, and tends to reduce false positives as forest is not a stable environment. The technique was applied on a Sentinel-1 dataset over an area in northern Belize.