Automatic extraction of cartographic information from airborne interferometric SAR data

Automatic classification of regions towards cartographic feature extraction by the airborne AeS-1 instrument is presented. We extract regions corresponding to cartographic features for the classes built-up area, forest, water and open area. Water and built-up area are extracted from the intensity image. The use of a DEM as additional source of information allows to distinguish built-up land and forest from all other classes. The mathematical tools for feature extraction from intensity and DEM data are fractal dimension estimation and mathematical morphology. The classification is done employing a decision tree.