Airborne InSAR image interpretation towards cartographic mapping

The capabilities of the airborne high-resolution AeS-1 X-Band InSAR data for automatic cartographic map production are investigated. The cartographic interpretation task becomes feasible by using coherence images and elevation information provided by InSAR processing additionally to the SAR backscatter image. Moreover, as in visual interpretation, features in SAR images are classified upon their textural appearance and background knowledge. Special attention is paid to SAR foreshortening and shadow ambiguities and their impact onto classification. Those ambiguity areas are derived from the DEM and taken into account in training example selection and a semantic classification step supporting a textural multilayer perceptron classifier. A contextual classification operating on MLP results incorporates class context and a-priori knowledge on class composition by Bayesian information fusion