A Novel Technique Based on Deep Learning and a Synthetic Target Database for Classification of Urban Areas in PolSAR Data

The classification of urban areas in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data is a challenging task. Moreover, urban structures oriented away from the radar line of sight pose an additional complexity in the classification process. The characterization of such areas is important for disaster relief and urban sprawl monitoring applications. In this paper, a novel technique based on deep learning is proposed, which leverages a synthetic target database for data augmentation. The PolSAR dataset is rotated by uniform steps and collated to form a reference database. A stacked autoencoder network is used to transform the information in the augmented dataset into a compact representation. This significantly improves the generalization capabilities of the network. Finally, the classification is performed by a multilayer perceptron network. The modular architecture allows for easy optimization of the hyperparameters. The synthetic target database is created and the classification performance is evaluated on an Lband airborne UAVSAR dataset and L-band space-borne ALOS-2 dataset acquired over San Francisco, USA. The proposed technique shows an overall accuracy of 91.3%. An improvement over state-of-the-art techniques is achieved, especially in urban areas rotated away from the radar line of sight.