Classifying multifrequency fully polarimetric imagery with multiple sources of statistical evidence and contextual information

This paper presents the use of a new distribution for fully polarimetric image classification. Several classification strategies are compared in order to assess the importance of a careful statistical modeling of the data and the complementary nature of the information provided by different frequencies. Spatial context, which is relevant in order to obtain good results with noisy data, is described by means of the multiclass Potts model, and an iterated conditional modes classification algorithm that employs pseudolikelihood is proposed. The data are described using multivariate Gaussian laws and fully multilook polarimetric distributions arising from the multiplicative model. L-band, C-band, and both bands are used to assess the influence of dimensionality on the classification. Contextual and pointwise maximum-likelihood classifications are compared using real data. Results show that both context and number of frequencies contribute for better classification products, and that, a careful statistical description of the data leads to improved results.