Transfer Learning With CNNs for Segmentation of PALSAR-2 Power Decomposition Components

Water/ice/land region segmentation is an important task for remote sensing, as it analyses the occurrence of water or ice on the earth's surface. Many previous deep learning researches effectively utilized multispectral satellite images for highly accurate water/ice/land region segmentation. However, the deep-learning-based segmentation of synthetic aperture radar images still remains a challenging task due to the unavailability of enough labeled data. In order to overcome this issue, we designed a two-step deep-learning-based transfer learning model that needs a very limited number of labeled samples. The proposed approach consists of two models. The first model is a deep encoder-decoder 6SD to Landsat-8 multispectral translation model (DTF) that translates fully polarimetric PALSAR-2 6SD data to six new features. As for the second model (transfer learning), it utilizes the DTF features to fine-tune the model using the Landsat-8 multispectral pretrained model for water/ice/land segmentation. Hereinafter, the proposed two-step model is referred to as DTF-TL. Also, a qualitative and quantitative analysis was carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed model (DTF-TL) and compare it with various transfer learning methods. Overall, the DTF-TL model outperformed the other models with consistent and reliable water/ice/land segmentation results in terms of the recall (0.980), precision (0.981), F1-score (0.981), mean intersection over union (0.962), and accuracy (0.989).