Assessment of polarimetric features to discriminate land cover from Maestro-1 Experiment

This paper is mainly devoted to the analysis of the discrimination capability of a radar polarimeter using a purely statistical approach. The statistical analysis is intended to find the set of variates that best summarizes the differences between classes. We have analysed the advantages of a fully polarimetric sensor with respect to a conventional radar that does not retain the phase relation between different polarizations. In this work, we have used the radar images acquired by the DC-8/AIRSAR over the Flevoland test site (Holland) during the MASTRO I campaign. The canonical discriminant analysis gives the best results to summarize the information content of the data and to reduce the dimension of the variables to be considered in the classification