Levee anomaly detection using polarimetric synthetic aperture radar data

This research presents results of applying the NASA JPL´s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) quad-polarized L-band data to detect anomalies on earthen levees. Two types of problems / anomalies that occur along these levees which can be precursors to complete failure during a high water event are slough slides and sand boils. The study area encompasses a portion of levees of the lower Mississippi river in the United States. Supervised and unsupervised classification techniques have been employed to detect slough slides along the levee. RX detector, a training-free classification scheme is introduced to detect anomalies on the levee and the results are compared with the k-means clustering algorithm. Using the available ground truth data, a supervised kernel based classification technique using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) is applied for binary classification of slides on the levee versus the healthy levee and the performance is compared with a neural network classifier.