Urban areas detection using polarimetric SAR images

In this paper we analyze the urban areas detection by using the polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data, thus we propose an algorithm for urban areas detection. The proposed algorithm for urban areas detection uses a comparison between the scattering powers computed from the Yamaguchi four components decomposition as a condition to discriminate data in urban and non-urban. Then we use the maximum likelihood complex Wishart classifier to improve the result. For the validation of our method we have used polarimetric SAR data acquired in C band by RadarSAT-2 over the city of Algiers in Algeria.