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The polarimetric SAR is a powerful, yet useful data for remote sensing due to its variable polarizations. The main defect of SAR data is that it is inherently accompanied with speckle. Speckle makes SAR data more difficult to interpret so that speckle must be filtered before it can be better applied in some applications. There are several speckle filtering schemes, but none of them is suitable for polarimetric SAR. Until recently a newly-developed SAR speckle filter, called Polarimetric SAR Speckle Filter [Lee, et al.,1997] was proposed. The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the filtering effects on classification of polarimetric SAR. The classifier applied in this study is a Fuzzy Dynamic Learning Neural Network [Tzeng and Chen, 1997], an excellent classifier for multiband image classification. Observations of inter-channel (HH, HV, VV) amplitude ratio and phase difference indicate that the new filter effectively suppresses the speckle noise, while preserves the polarimetric information. Classification accuracy was substantially improved.
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