Feature Design for Classification from Tomosar Data

While previous work primarily focused on using Tomographic Synthetic Aperture Radar (TomoSAR) data to analyze the 3D structure of the imaged scene, we study its potential for the generation of semantic land cover maps in a supervised framework. We extract different features from the covariance matrices of a tomographic image stack as well as from the tomograms computed by tomographic focusing. To assess the impact of our approach, we compare our results to classification maps obtained from a fully polarimetric image. We show that it is possible to outperform classification results from polarimetric data by carefully designing hand-crafted features which can be extracted either from multi-baseline single polarization covariance matrices or from tomograms obtained after tomographic focusing. Our experiments show a significant gain in the classification accuracy, especially on challenging classes such as heterogeneous city and road.