Optical and radar data comparison and integration: Kenya example

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relative classification accuracies of four land covers/uses in Kenya using spaceborne quad polarization radar from the Japanese ALOS PALSAR system and optical Landsat Thematic Mapper data. Supervised signature extraction and classification (maximum likelihood) was used to classify the different land covers/uses followed by an accuracy assessment. The original four band radar had an overall accuracy of 77%. Variance texture was the most useful of four measures examined and did improve overall accuracy to 80% and improved the producer’s accuracy for urban by almost 25% over the original radar. Landsat provided a higher overall classification accuracy (86%) as compared to radar. The merger of Landsat with the radar texture did not increase overall accuracy but did improve the producer’s accuracy for urban indicated some advantages for sensor integration.