Filtering Effect in Supervised Classification of Polarimetric Ground Based SAR Images

We investigated the speckle filtering effect in supervised classification of the C-band polarimetric Ground Based SAR image data. Wishart classification method was used for the supervised classification of the polarimetric GB-SAR image data and total of 6 kinds of speckle filters were applied before supervised classification, which are boxcar, Gaussian, Lopez, IDAN, the refined Lee, and the refined Lee sigma filters. For each filters, we changed the filtering kernel size from 3 x 3 to 9 x 9 to investigate the filtering size effect also. The refined Lee filter with the kernel size of bigger than 5 x 5 showed the best result for the Wishart supervised classification of polarimetric GB-SAR image data. The result also showed that the type of trees could be discriminated by Wishart supervised classification of polarimetric GB-SAR image data.