Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) classification based on SAR/Sentinel 1 image in Distrito Federal, Brazil

Abstract The social and environmental challenges are directly related to the existing population concentration in urban environments, contributing to more than 75% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Thus, the Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) dynamics are essential to support public policy elaboration and implementation. SAR systems, especially the interferometry techniques, have shown remarkable results in this challenge since they do not have direct influence from the atmosphere. Few studies used interferometric coherence from the Sentinel-1 image in an urban environment. This research aims to classify the LULC in the Distrito Federal, Brazil, based on different dimensions considering the intensity and interferometric coherence for the year 2018. The results measured from the Kappa and F1 metrics indicate that the insertion of a time series of interferometric coherencies improves the performance of the classification, from 0.50 to 0.75 (Kappa) and from 0.54to 0.79 (F1), a fact that was evident in the improved performance of the thematic classes related to vegetation cover. Furthermore, the best identification of urban objects used only the intensities (VV and VH) in the classification.