Extraction of Impervious Surface Using Sentinel-1A Time-Series Coherence Images with the Aid of a Sentinel-2A Image

Abstract

The continuous increasing of impervious surface (IS) hinders the sustainable development of cities. Using optical images alone to extract IS is usually limited by weather, which obliges us to develop new data sources. The obvious differences between natural and artificial targets in interferometric synthetic-aperture radar coherence images have attracted the attention of researchers. A few studies have attempted to use coherence images to extract IS—mostly single-temporal coherence images, which are affected by de-coherence factors. And due to speckle, the results are rather fragmented. In this study, we used time-series coherence images and introduced multi-resolution segmentation as a postprocessing step to extract IS. From our experiments, the results from the proposed method were more complete and achieved considerable accuracy, confirming the potential of time-series coherence images for extracting IS.