Moving Toward L‐Band NASA‐ISRO SAR Mission (NISAR) Dense Time Series: Multipolarization Object‐Based Classification of Wetlands Using Two Machine Learning Algorithms

Abstract

Abstract Given the key role wetlands play in climate regulation and shoreline stabilization, identifying their spatial distribution is essential for the management, restoration, and protection of these invaluable ecosystems. The increasing availability of high spatial and temporal resolution optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing data coupled with advanced machine learning techniques have provided an unprecedented opportunity for mapping complex wetlands’ ecosystems. A recent partnership between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) resulted in the design of the NASA‐ISRO SAR (NISAR) mission. In this study, the capability of L‐band simulated NISAR data for wetland mapping in Yucatan Lake, Louisiana, is investigated using two object‐based machine learning approaches: Support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF). L‐band Unmanned Aerial Vehicle SAR (UAVSAR) data are exploited as a proxy for NISAR data. Specifically, we evaluated the synergistic use of different polarimetric features for efficient delineation of wetland types, extracting 84 polarimetric features from more than 10 polarimetric decompositions. High spatial resolution National Agriculture Imagery Program imagery is applied for image segmentation using the mean‐shift algorithm. Overall accuracies of 74.33% and 81.93% obtained by SVM and RF, respectively, demonstrate the great possibility of L‐band prototype NISAR data for wetland mapping and monitoring. In addition, variable importance analysis using the Gini index for RF classifier suggests that H/A/ALPHA, Freeman‐Durden, and Aghababaee features have the highest contribution to the overall accuracy.

Keywords

• NISAR
• machine learning
• random forest
• SVM
• classification
• wetland mapping