Analysis of land cover/use over Penang Island, Malaysia by using ALOS PALSAR data

Microwave Remote sensing data have been widely used for detecting and analyzing land cover/use feature in our environment. The objective of this project is to investigate the use of multi-polarized data of ALOS-PALSAR data for land cover/use mapping. ASF MapReady programs from Alaska satellite Facility Geographical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks was used for the preprocessing of ALOS-PALSAR data. Standard supervised classification techniques such as the maximum likelihood, minimum distance-to-mean, and parallelepiped were chosen for the ALOS-PALSAR images in land cover mapping. Some filtering and enhancement methods were applied to reduce speckle noise and to contrast the images. The ALOS-PALSAR data was classified into four categories, such as forest, urban, water and open land. The ALOS-PALSAR data training areas were choose based on optical satellite imagery. The land cover information was extracted from the digital data using PCI Geomatica 10.1 software package. The classification accuracy was used to evaluate the best performing data combination. This study indicates that the land cover/use of Penang Island, Malaysia can be mapped accurately using ALOS PALSAR data.