USING L-BAND SAR IMAGES TO MAP COASTAL WETLANDS

The National Wetland Inventory (NWI) in the USA is required, by congress mandate, to map wetlands every ten years. The last time the wetlands were map was in the mid-1980s using labour intensive, aerial photograph analysis techniques. The goal of this project is to map wetlands, based on the US-FWS NWI coastal wetland classes, in North Carolina using ALOS 10 m polarimetric radar. Wishart unsupervised classification using Cloude decomposition images resulted in 78-94% classification accuracy of four of the ten wetland classes. Images from Freeman-Durden and Touzi decompositions will be incorporated into the classification to achieve good accuracies for the remaining six wetland classes.