Image fusion and classification of ENVISAT ASAR and ETM+ data

Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) is the optical sensor of the Landsat-7 satellite. ENVISAT satellite with Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar sensors (ASAR) is one of the earth observation satellites series of European Space Agency. Nowadays radar remote sensing is being widely used in various detection research programs for its capacity of all-weather, alltime and penetrability. The processing of radar data has been a research emphasis. In this paper, we use two kinds of data as the research object. One of them is the radar data of the ENVISAT satellite advanced synthetic aperture radar (ASAR) sensor, the other one is the multi-spectral image of the Landsat7 satellite ETM+ sensor. We analyzed the two polarization modes comparatively: horizontal polarization (HH) and cross polarization (HV) through their fusion images with multi-spectral data. Besides, we made a ground targets classification of the fusion image and compared the results. It can be seen that polarization radar can improve the classification precision of differentiation of ground feature that in substantial difference of moisture content compare with the traditional optical fusion image. In the study area of this paper, the classification precision of buildings and paddy field improved by 4% and 5% respectively.