Since classification methods based on H/α space have the drawback of yielding poor classification results for terrains with similar scattering features, in this study, we propose a polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image classification method based on eigenvalues. First, we extract eigenvalues and fit their distribution with an adaptive Gaussian mixture model. Then, using the naive Bayesian classifier, we obtain preliminary classification results. The distribution of eigenvalues in two kinds of terrains may be similar, leading to incorrect classification in the preliminary step. So, we calculate the similarity of every terrain pair, and add them to the similarity table if their similarity is greater than a given threshold. We then apply the Wishart distance-based KNN classifier to these similar pairs to obtain further classification results. We used the proposed method on both airborne and spaceborne SAR datasets, and the results show that our method can overcome the shortcoming of the H/α-based unsupervised classification method for eigenvalues usage, and produces comparable results with the Support Vector Machine (SVM)-based classification method.
2016, Vol. 5 
