A method for thematic classification with synthetic aperture radar data

Synthetic aperture radar data possess many different characteristics to conventional remotely sensed data. They therefore should not be analysed in the same fashion. However, since there is no standard technique for the classification of radar data techniques formulated for use on other data sets are often used. Since these make no allowance for the unusual properties of radar data they will not exploit fully the data's information content. A method which compensates for some of the main characteristics of the radar data and significantly increases classification accuracy is proposed in this article.