Earthen levee monitoring with Synthetic Aperture Radar

The latest results are presented from an ongoing study of the use of multi-polarized Synthetic Aperture Radar as an aid in screening earthen levees for weak points. Both L-band airborne and X-band spaceborne radars are studied, using the NASA UAVSAR and the German TerraSAR-X platforms. Feature detection and classification algorithms tested for this application include both radiometric and textural methods. Radiometric features include both the simple backscatter magnitudes of the HH, VV, and HV channels as well as decompositions such as Entropy, Anisotropy, and Alpha angle. Textural methods include grey-level co-occurrence matrix and wavelet features. Classifiers tested include Maximum Likelihood and Artificial Neural Networks. The study area includes 240 km of levees along the lower Mississippi River. Results to date are encouraging but still very preliminary and in need of further validation and testing.