  Classification of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images is an
active research area with a major role in environmental applications. The
traditional Machine Learning (ML) methods proposed in this domain generally
focus on utilizing highly discriminative features to improve the classification
performance, but this task is complicated by the well-known "curse of
dimensionality" phenomena. Other approaches based on deep Convolutional Neural
Networks (CNNs) have certain limitations and drawbacks, such as high
computational complexity, an unfeasibly large training set with ground-truth
labels, and special hardware requirements. In this work, to address the
limitations of traditional ML and deep CNN based methods, a novel and
systematic classification framework is proposed for the classification of
PolSAR images, based on a compact and adaptive implementation of CNNs using a
sliding-window classification approach. The proposed approach has three
advantages. First, there is no requirement for an extensive feature extraction
process. Second, it is computationally efficient due to utilized compact
configurations. In particular, the proposed compact and adaptive CNN model is
designed to achieve the maximum classification accuracy with minimum training
and computational complexity. This is of considerable importance considering
the high costs involved in labelling in PolSAR classification. Finally, the
proposed approach can perform classification using smaller window sizes than
deep CNNs. Experimental evaluations have been performed over the most
commonly-used four benchmark PolSAR images: AIRSAR L-Band and RADARSAT-2 C-Band
data of San Francisco Bay and Flevoland areas. Accordingly, the best obtained
overall accuracies range between 92.33 - 99.39% for these benchmark study
sites.
