Medium Resolution SAR Image Time-series Built-up Area Extraction Based on Multilayer Neural Network

To improve the accuracy and stability of built-up area extraction from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image time series, in this paper, we propose a multilayer neural-network-based built-up area extraction method that combines the characters of time-series images. The proposed method coarsely tags single images and obtains a large number of samples from time-series images that have been processed by a histogram specification procedure. To generate a training sample dataset, we use samples generated from one image to determine network depth and select samples with higher accuracy from the sample set taken from the time-series images. The final model is trained by the selected large and high quality training dataset. We perform two comparison experiments with 38 25-m resolution ENVISAT ASAR images. Using the proposed method, we achieved 90.2% minima accuracy and a 0.725 minima Kappa coefficient, which are much higher than those of the three conventional methods. Thus, the accuracy and stability of built-up area extraction are significantly improved. In addition, the method proposed in this paper has the advantages of requiring minimal manual operation, well generalization, and training efficiency.