Analysis of airborne SAR data (L-band) for discrimination land use/land cover types in the Brazilian Amazon region

The objective of this paper is to show the potential of multi-polarized mosaic-images from a MAPSAR (L-band) simulation campaign performed in the Amazon region (test site Tapajós) in order to discriminate land use/land cover classes. An Enhanced-Frost filter was used and the thematic discrimination was done by an algorithm for attribute extraction based on Bhattacharya distance. A comparison was made among the radiometric aspects of the SAR mosaic for 10 thematic classes obtained, converting these B-distances to JM distance values. This allowed to define which individual or multiple polarizations are more appropriate for the identification of thematic classes.