Monitoring the Wetland of the Yellow River Delta by Combining GF-3 Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar and Sentinel-2A Multispectral Data

Abstract

Wetlands in estuary deltas functionally protect biodiversity, store water, and regulate ecological balance. However, wetland monitoring accuracy is low when using only synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images or optical images. This study proposes a novel method for extracting ground objects in a wetland using principal component analysis (PCA) and random forest (RF) classification, which combines the features of fully polarimetric SAR images and optical images. Firstly, polarization decomposition features and texture features were extracted based on polarimetric SAR data, and spectral features were extracted based on optical data. Secondly, the optical image was registered to SAR image. Then PCA was performed on the nine polarimetric features of the SAR images and the four spectral features of the optical images to obtain the first two principal components of each. After combining these components, a RF classification algorithm was used to extract the objects. The objects in the Yellow River Delta wetland were successfully extracted using our proposed method with Gaofen-3 fully polarimetric SAR data and Sentinel-2A optical data acquired in November 2018. The overall accuracy of the proposed method was 86.18%, and the Kappa coefficient was 0.84. This was an improvement of 18.96% and 0.22, respectively, over the GF-3 polarimetric features classification, and 11.02% and 0.13, respectively, over the Sentinel-2A spectral features classification. Compared with the results of the support vector machine, maximum likelihood, and minimum distance classification algorithms, the overall accuracy of the RF classification based on joint features was 2.03, 5.69, and 23.36% higher, respectively, and the Kappa coefficient was 0.03, 0.07, and 0.27 higher, respectively. Therefore, this novel method can increase the accuracy of the extraction of objects in a wetland, providing a reliable technical means for wetland monitoring.