COMPARISON OF OPTICAL AND SAR DATA IN TROPICAL LAND COVER CLASSIFICATION FOR REDD+

摘要

A comparison study was performed to evaluate thernapplicability of optical and SAR data for land coverrnclassification for REDD+ services on a test site inrnChiapas State in Mexico. The accuracy of the maps wasrnassessed using an independent data set that wasrncollected from very high resolution optical data.rnThe overall accuracy of the maps varied between 79 %rnof ENVISAT ASAR and 94 % of RapidEye for thernforest – non-forest classifications. The accuracies for thernsix IPCC compliant classes were from 5 to 9 percentagernunits lower. Results that were obtained with the opticalrndata were somewhat better than the results using thernSAR data. However, the difference between the opticalrnand SAR results was fairly small when L-band SARrndata were used. L-band SAR data seem to berncompetitive alternative for optical data particularly inrnthe areas with frequent cloud cover.