Multi-scale texture in SAR imagery: Landscape dynamics of the Pantanal, Brazil

The potential for environmental monitoring of natural landscapes using radar remote sensing is great. However, to realize this potential, new tools for radar image analysis are needed. Landscapes that exhibit complex spatio-temporal variability in terms of backscattering cannot be well characterized using standard approaches to texture. The authors assess three methods for multi-scale texture measurement: lacunarity, diversity, and GLCM measures. They used three ERS-1 SAR images of the Nhecolandia region of the Brazilian Pantanal from December 1992 to May 1993. Lacunarity and diversity measures captured the seasonal transformation of the landscape due to rising floodwaters; GLCM measures did not, however, exhibit much sensitivity to either anisotropies or temporal differences in images. In addition, lacunarity analysis was able to distinguish between speckle-generated texture from texture produced by scene object backscattering.