Fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar data classification using probabilistic and non-probabilistic kernel methods

The data classification of fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) is one of the favourite topics in the remote sensing community. To date, a wide variety of algorithms have been utilized for PolSAR data classification, and among them kernel methods are the most attractive algorithms for this purpose. The most famous kernel method, i.e., the support vector machine (SVM) has been widely used for PolSAR data classification. However, until now, no studies to classify PolSAR data have been carried out using certain extended SVM versions, such as the least squares support vector machine (LSSVM), relevance vector machine (RVM) and import vector machine (IVM). Therefore, this work has employed and compared these four kernel methods for the classification of three PolSAR data sets. These methods were compared in two groups: the SVM and LSSVM as non-probabilistic kernel methods vs. the RVM and IVM as probabilistic kernel methods. In general, the results demonstrated that the SVM was marginally better, more accurate and more stable than the probabilistic kernels. Furthermore, the LSSVM performed much faster than the probabilistic kernel methods and its associated version, the SVM, with comparable accuracy. © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.