A Comparison of AIRSAR and SPOT Imagery for Land Cover Mapping

There are two main types based of remote sensing which is known as optical based and radar based. This study related to investigation of the use of AIRSAR imagery compare to SPOT imagery for land cover mapping purpose. Covering the Muda Merbok area as a case study, 10 meters resolution of airborne (AIRSAR imagery) and 20 meters resolution of optical based (SPOT imagery) which has been resample into 10 meters resolution output were used. The imageries used were at same year 2000. Both imageries had been processed by using ENVI (for AIRSAR imagery) and ERDAS IMAGINE (for SPOT imagery). The synthesize or decompress data, slant to ground range conversion, mask pixels of extreme values, antenna pattern correction and speckle removing were among the steps in AIRSAR data processing. For SPOT imagery the general steps like geocoding, subset, clumps, eliminate and recode were used. The supervised classifications for both images were performed to produce the classification maps. From these two images processing, comparison between both of the images were performed and then the land cover mapping for AIRSAR and SPOT were produced. It is found that land cover mapping based from the AIRSAR imagery is also reliable for land cover mapping compared to SPOT imagery.