Polsar region classifier based on stochastic distances and hypothesis tests

This work presents a region based classifier for Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) images. The classifier uses the stochastic distances derived from the complex Wishart Model, obtained from the h-φ family of divergences. Adittionaly, a hypothesis test derived from the stochastic distance is also employed in the classification process. The region based classifier, using the Bhattacharyya distance, was applied to a polarimetric SIR-C image from an agricultural area in northeastern Brazil. The region based classification result significantly overperformed the a pixel based/contextual PolSAR classification based on the Maximum Likelihood/Iterated Conditional Modes. Such evidence lead us to conclude that the region based stochastic distance and hypothesis test classifier offers a good potential at identifying the land cover classes on a PolSAR image.