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Open Access Complex-Valued Multi-Layer Perceptrons – An Application to Polarimetric SAR Data

Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are powerful function approximators. In the last decades they were successfully applied to many different regression and classification problems. Their characteristics and convergence properties are well studied and relatively well understood, but they were originally designed to work with real-valued data. The main focus of this paper is the classification of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (POLSAR) data which are a complexvalued signal. Instead of using an arbitrarily projection of this complex-valued data to the real domain, the paper proposes the usage of complex-valued MLPs (CV-MLPs), which are an extension of MLPs to the complex domain. The paper provides a detailed yet general derivation of the complex backpropagation algorithm and mentions related problems as well as possible solutions. Furthermore, it evaluates the performance of CV-MLPs in a land-cover classification task in POLSAR images under several learning conditions, and compares the proposed classifier with standard methods. The experimental results show that CV-MLPs are successfully applicable to classification tasks in POLSAR data. They show good convergence properties and a better performance if compared to real-valued MLPs.

Document Type: Research Article

Publication date: September 1, 2010

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  • The official journal of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing - the Imaging and Geospatial Information Society (ASPRS). This highly respected publication covers all facets of photogrammetry and remote sensing methods and technologies.

    Founded in 1934, the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) is a scientific association serving over 7,000 professional members around the world. Our mission is to advance knowledge and improve understanding of mapping sciences to promote the responsible applications of photogrammetry, remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS), and supporting technologies.
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