LOS PALSAR data analysis of snow cover area in Himalayan region using four component scattering decomposition technique

Snow cover is the important parameter for hydrological modeling and climate change modeling. Land use/cover classification is one of the most important applications of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (POLSAR) sensing. Hence, the application of radar polarimetry is one of the best remote sensing techniques to classify snow cover terrain. In this paper, PALSAR data have been analyzed of snow cover area in Himalayan region based on three and four component scattering mechanism model. This study shows the implementation problem of four-component decomposition model in Himalayan terrain. Finally, supervised Wishart classifier has been used for snow cover and other land feature classification. The over all accuracy was measured to be 74.12 % without speckle noise reduction.