Urban monitoring using multi-temporal SAR and multi-spectral data

In some key operational domains, the joint use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and multi-spectral sensors has shown to be a powerful tool for Earth observation. In this paper, we analyze the potentialities of combining interferometric SAR and multi-spectral data for urban area characterization and monitoring. This study is carried out following a standard multi-source processing chain. First, a pre-processing stage is performed taking into account the underlying physics, geometry, and statistical models for the data from each sensor. Second, two different methodologies, one for supervised and another for unsupervised approaches, are followed to obtain features that optimize the urban rela…