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Due to the advent of powerful parallel processing tools, including modern Graphics Processing Units (GPU), new deep learning algorithms, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have significa...

Since the rise of deep learning in the past few years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have quickly found their place within the remote sensing (RS) community. As a result, they have transitioned away from other machine learning techniques, achieving unprecedented improvements in many specific RS applications. This article presents a meta-analysis of 416 peer-reviewed journal articles, summarizes CNN advancements, and its current status under RS applications. The review process includes a statistical and descriptive analysis of a database comprised of 23 fields, including: 1) general characteristics, such as various applications, study objectives, sensors, and data types, and 2) algorithm specifications, such as different types of CNN models, parameter settings, and reported accuracies. This review begins with a comprehensive survey of the relevant articles without considering any specific criteria to give readers an idea of general trends, and then investigates CNNs within different RS applications to provide specific directions for the researchers. Finally, a conclusion summarizes potentialities, critical issues, and challenges related to the observed trends.

Wetlands across Canada have been, and continue to be, lost or altered under the influence of both anthropogenic and natural activities. The ability to assess the rate of change to wetland habitats ...

Recently, there has been a significant increase in efforts to better inventory and manage important ecosystems across Canada using advanced remote sensing techniques. In this study, we improved the...

Detailed information on the spatial distribution of wetlands is crucial for sustainable management and resource assessment. Furthermore, regularly updated wetland inventories are of particular impo...

Several machine-learning algorithms have been proposed for remote sensing image classification during the past two decades. Among these machine learning algorithms, Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) have drawn attention to image classification in several remote sensing applications. This article reviews RF and SVM concepts relevant to remote sensing image classification and applies a meta-analysis of 251 peer-reviewed journal papers. A database with more than 40 quantitative and qualitative fields was constructed from these reviewed papers. The meta-analysis mainly focuses on 1) the analysis regarding the general characteristics of the studies, such as geographical distribution, frequency of the papers considering time, journals, application domains, and remote sensing software packages used in the case studies, and 2) a comparative analysis regarding the performances of RF and SVM classification against various parameters, such as data type, RS applications, spatial resolution, and the number of extracted features in the feature engineering step. The challenges, recommendations, and potential directions for future research are also discussed in detail. Moreover, a summary of the results is provided to aid researchers to customize their efforts in order to achieve the most accurate results based on their thematic applications.

Wetlands are important ecosystems that are linked to climate change mitigation. As 25% of global wetlands are located in Canada, accurate and up-to-date wetland classification is of high importance, nationally and internationally. The advent of deep learning techniques has revolutionized the current use of machine learning algorithms to classify complex environments, specifically in remote sensing. In this paper, we explore the potential and possible limitations to be overcome regarding the use of ensemble deep learning techniques for complex wetland classification and discusses the potential and limitation of various solo convolutional neural networks (CNNs), including DenseNet, GoogLeNet, ShuffleNet, MobileNet, Xception, Inception-ResNet, ResNet18, and ResNet101 in three different study areas located in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada (i.e., Avalon, Gros Morne, and Grand Falls). Moreover, to improve the classification accuracies of wetland classes of bog, fen, marsh, swamp, and shallow water, the results of the three best CNNs in each study area is fused using three supervised classifiers of random forest (RF), bagged tree (BTree), Bayesian optimized tree (BOT), and one unsupervised majority voting classifier. The results suggest that the ensemble models, in particular BTree, have a valuable role to play in the classification of wetland classes of bog, fen, marsh, swamp, and shallow water. The ensemble CNNs show an improvement of 9.63–19.04% in terms of mean producer’s accuracy compared to the solo CNNs, to recognize wetland classes in three different study areas. This research indicates a promising potential for integrating ensemble-based learning and deep learning for operational large area land cover, particularly complex wetland type classification.

Canada’s successful space-based earth-observation (EO) radar program has earned widespread and expanding user acceptance following the launch of RADARSAT-1 in 1995. RADARSAT-2, launched in 2007, while providing data continuity for its predecessor’s imaging capabilities, added new polarimetric modes. Canada’s follow-up program, the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM), launched in 2019, while providing continuity for its two predecessors, includes an innovative suite of polarimetric modes. In an effort to make polarimetry accessible to a wide range of operational users, RCM uses a new method called hybrid compact polarization (HCP). There are two essential elements to this approach: (1) transmit only one polarization, circular; and (2) receive two orthogonal polarizations, for which RCM uses H and V. This configuration overcomes the conventional dual and full polarimetric system limitations, which are lacking enough polarimetric information and having a small swath width, respectively. Thus, HCP data can be considered as dual-pol data, while the resulting polarimetric classifications of features in an observed scene are of comparable accuracy as those derived from the traditional fully polarimetric (FP) approach. At the same time, RCM’s HCP methodology is applicable to all imaging modes, including wide swath and ScanSAR, thus overcoming critical limitations of traditional imaging radar polarimetry for operational use. The primary image data products from an HCP radar are different from those of a traditional polarimetric radar. Because the HCP modes transmit circularly polarized signals, the data processing to extract polarimetric information requires different approaches than those used for conventional linearly polarized polarimetric data. Operational users, as well as researchers and students, are most likely to achieve disappointing results if they work with traditional polarimetric processing tools. New tools are required. Existing tutorials, older seminar notes, and reference papers are not sufficient, and if left unrevised, could succeed in discouraging further use of RCM polarimetric data. This paper is designed to provide an initial response to that need. A systematic review of studies that used HCP SAR data for environmental monitoring is also provided. Based on this review, HCP SAR data have been employed in oil spill monitoring, target detection, sea ice monitoring, agriculture, wetland classification, and other land cover applications.

Despite the application of state-of-the-art fully Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for semantic segmentation of very high-resolution optical imagery, their capacity has not yet been thoroughly examined for the classification of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. The presence of speckle noise, the absence of efficient feature expression, and the limited availability of labelled SAR samples have hindered the application of the state-of-the-art CNNs for the classification of SAR imagery. This is of great concern for mapping complex land cover ecosystems, such as wetlands, where backscattering/spectrally similar signatures of land cover units further complicate the matter. Accordingly, we propose a new Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) architecture that can be trained in an end-to-end scheme and is specifically designed for the classification of wetland complexes using polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) imagery. The proposed architecture follows an encoder-decoder paradigm, wherein the input data are fed into a stack of convolutional filters (encoder) to extract high-level abstract features and a stack of transposed convolutional filters (decoder) to gradually up-sample the low resolution output to the spatial resolution of the original input image. The proposed network also benefits from recent advances in CNN designs, namely the addition of inception modules and skip connections with residual units. The former component improves multi-scale inference and enriches contextual information, while the latter contributes to the recovery of more detailed information and simplifies optimization. Moreover, an in-depth investigation of the learned features via opening the black box demonstrates that convolutional filters extract discriminative polarimetric features, thus mitigating the limitation of the feature engineering design in PolSAR image processing. Experimental results from full polarimetric RADARSAT-2 imagery illustrate that the proposed network outperforms the conventional random forest classifier and the state-of-the-art FCNs, such as FCN-32s, FCN-16s, FCN-8s, and SegNet, both visually and numerically for wetland mapping.

Wetlands are home to a great variety of flora and fauna species and provide several unique environmental services. Knowledge of wetland species distribution is critical for sustainable management and resource assessment. In this study, multi-temporal single- and full-polarized RADARSAT-2 and single-polarized TerraSAR-X data were applied to characterize the wetland extent of a test site located in the north east of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The accuracy and information content of wetland maps using remote sensing data depend on several factors, such as the type of data, input features, classification algorithms, and ecological characteristics of wetland classes. Most previous wetland studies examined the efficiency of one or two feature types, including intensity and polarimetry. Fewer investigations have examined the potential of interferometric coherence for wetland mapping. Thus, we evaluated the efficiency of using multiple feature types, including intensity, interferometric coherence, and polarimetric scattering for wetland mapping in multiple classification scenarios. An ensemble classifier, namely Random Forest (RF), and a kernel-based Support Vector Machine (SVM) were also used to determine the effect of the classifier. In all classification scenarios, SVM outperformed RF by 1.5–5%. The classification results demonstrated that the intensity features had a higher accuracy relative to coherence and polarimetric features. However, an inclusion of all feature types improved the classification accuracy for both RF and SVM classifiers. We also optimized the type and number of input features using an integration of RF variable importance and Spearman’s rank-order correlation. The results of this analysis found that, of 81 input features, 22 were the most important uncorrelated features for classification. An overall classification accuracy of 85.4% was achieved by incorporating these 22 important uncorrelated features based on the proposed classification framework.

Permafrost-induced deformation of ground features is threating infrastructure in northern communities. An understanding of permafrost distribution is therefore critical for sustainable adaptation p...

Wetlands provide a wide variety of environmental services globally and detailed wetland inventory maps are always necessary to determine the conservation strategies and effectively monitor these productive ecosystems. During the last two decades, satellite remote sensing data have been extensively used for wetland mapping and monitoring worldwide. Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) imagery is a complex and multi-dimensional data, which has high potential to discriminate different land cover types. However, despite significant improvements to both information content in PolSAR imagery and advanced classification approaches, wetland classification using PolSAR data may not provide acceptable classification accuracy. This is because classification accuracy using PolSAR imagery strongly depends on the polarimetric features that are incorporated into the classification scheme. In this paper, a novel feature weighting method for PolSAR imagery is proposed to increase the classification accuracy of complex land cover. Specifically, a new coefficient is determined for each element of the coherency matrix by integration of Fisher Linear Discriminant Analysis (FLDA) and physical interpretation of the PolSAR data. The proposed methodology was applied to multi-temporal polarimetric C-band RADARSAT-2 data in the Avalon Peninsula, Deer Lake, and Gros Morne pilot sites in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Different combinations of input features, including original PolSAR features, polarimetric decomposition features, and modified coherency matrix were used to evaluate the capacity of the proposed method for improving the classification accuracy using the Random Forest (RF) algorithm. The results demonstrated that the modified coherency matrix obtained by the proposed method, Van Zyl, and Freeman-Durden decomposition features were the most important features for wetland classification. The fine spatial resolution maps obtained in this study illustrate the distribution of terrestrial and aquatic habitats for the three wetland pilot sites in Newfoundland using the modified coherency matrix and other polarimetric features. The classified maps provide valuable baseline data for effectively monitoring climate and land cover changes, and support further scientific research in this area.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) compact polarimetry (CP) systems are of great interest for large area monitoring because of their ability to acquire data in a wider swath compared to full polarimetry (FP) systems and a significant improvement in information content compared to single or dual polarimetry (DP) sensors. In this study, we compared the potential of DP, FP, and CP SAR data for wetland classification in a case study located in Newfoundland, Canada. The DP and CP data were simulated using full polarimetric RADARSAT-2 data. We compared the classification results for different input features using an object-based random forest classification. The results demonstrated the superiority of FP imagery relative to both DP and CP data. However, CP indicated significant improvements in classification accuracy compared to DP data. An overall classification accuracy of approximately 76% and 84% was achieved with the inclusion of all polarimetric features extracted from CP and FP data, respectively. In...

Speckle noise significantly degrades the radiometric quality of PolSAR image and, consequently, decreases the classification accuracy. This article proposes a new speckle reduction method for PolSAR imagery based on an adaptive Gaussian Markov Random Field model. We also introduce a new span image, called pseudo-span, obtained by the diagonal elements of the coherency matrix based on the least square analysis. The proposed de-speckling method was applied to full polarimetric C-band RADARSAT-2 data from the Avalon area, Newfoundland, Canada. The efficiency of the proposed method was evaluated in 2 different levels: de-speckled images and classified maps obtained by the Random Forest classifier. In terms of de-speckling, the proposed method illustrated approximately 19%, 43%, 46%, and 50% improvements in equivalent number of looks values, in comparison with SARBM3D, Enhanced Lee, Frost, and Kuan filter, respectively. Also, improvements of approximately 19%, 9%, 55%, and 32% were obtained in the over...

With uninterrupted space-based data collection since 1972, Landsat plays a key role in systematic monitoring of the Earth’s surface, enabled by an extensive and free, radiometrically consistent, global archive of imagery. Governments and international organizations rely on Landsat time series for monitoring and deriving a systematic understanding of the dynamics of the Earth’s surface at a spatial scale relevant to management, scientific inquiry, and policy development. In this study, we identify trends in Landsat-informed change detection studies by surveying 50 years of published applications, processing, and change detection methods. Specifically, a representative database was created resulting in 490 relevant journal articles derived from the Web of Science and Scopus. From these articles, we provide a review of recent developments, opportunities, and trends in Landsat change detection studies. The impact of the Landsat free and open data policy in 2008 is evident in the literature as a turning point in the number and nature of change detection studies. Based upon the search terms used and articles included, average number of Landsat images used in studies increased from 10 images before 2008 to 100,000 images in 2020. The 2008 opening of the Landsat archive resulted in a marked increase in the number of images used per study, typically providing the basis for the other trends in evidence. These key trends include an increase in automated processing, use of analysis-ready data (especially those with atmospheric correction), and use of cloud computing platforms, all over increasing large areas. The nature of change methods has evolved from representative bi-temporal pairs to time series of images capturing dynamics and trends, capable of revealing both gradual and abrupt changes. The result also revealed a greater use of nonparametric classifiers for Landsat change detection analysis. Landsat-9, to be launched in September 2021, in combination with the continued operation of Landsat-8 and integration with Sentinel-2, enhances opportunities for improved monitoring of change over increasingly larger areas with greater intra- and interannual frequency.

Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) imagery is a complex multi-dimensional dataset, which is an important source of information for various natural resources and environmental classification and monitoring applications. PolSAR imagery produces valuable information by observing scattering mechanisms from different natural and man-made objects. Land cover mapping using PolSAR data classification is one of the most important applications of SAR remote sensing earth observations, which have gained increasing attention in the recent years. However, one of the most challenging aspects of classification is selecting features with maximum discrimination capability. To address this challenge, a statistical approach based on the Fisher Linear Discriminant Analysis (FLDA) and the incorporation of physical interpretation of PolSAR data into classification is proposed in this paper. After pre-processing of PolSAR data, including the speckle reduction, the H/α classification is used in order to classify the basic scattering mechanisms. Then, a new method for feature weighting, based on the fusion of FLDA and physical interpretation, is implemented. This method proves to increase the classification accuracy as well as increasing between-class discrimination in the final Wishart classification. The proposed method was applied to a full polarimetric C-band RADARSAT-2 data set from Avalon area, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. This imagery has been acquired in June 2015, and covers various types of wetlands including bogs, fens, marshes and shallow water. The results were compared with the standard Wishart classification, and an improvement of about 20% was achieved in the overall accuracy. This method provides an opportunity for operational wetland classification in northern latitude with high accuracy using only SAR polarimetric data.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imaging systems have recently gained significant attention from researchers and practitioners as a cost-effective means for agro-environmental applications. In particular, machine learning algorithms have been applied to UAV-based remote sensing data for enhancing the UAV capabilities of various applications. This systematic review was performed on studies through a statistical meta-analysis of UAV applications along with machine learning algorithms in agro-environmental monitoring. For this purpose, a total number of 163 peer-reviewed articles published in 13 high-impact remote sensing journals over the past 20 years were reviewed focusing on several features, including study area, application, sensor type, platform type, and spatial resolution. The meta-analysis revealed that 62% and 38% of the studies applied regression and classification models, respectively. Visible sensor technology was the most frequently used sensor with the highest overall accuracy among classification articles. Regarding regression models, linear regression and random forest were the most frequently applied models in UAV remote sensing imagery processing. Finally, the results of this study confirm that applying machine learning approaches on UAV imagery produces fast and reliable results. Agriculture, forestry, and grassland mapping were found as the top three UAV applications in this review, in 42%, 22%, and 8% of the studies, respectively.

The production of spatially detailed quantitative maps of water level variations in flooded vegetation, and the detection of flow patterns and discontinuities in both managed and natural wetland ec...

Wetlands are one of the most important ecosystems that provide a desirable habitat for a great variety of flora and fauna. Wetland mapping and modeling using Earth Observation (EO) data are essential for natural resource management at both regional and national levels. However, accurate wetland mapping is challenging, especially on a large scale, given their heterogeneous and fragmented landscape, as well as the spectral similarity of differing wetland classes. Currently, precise, consistent, and comprehensive wetland inventories on a national- or provincial-scale are lacking globally, with most studies focused on the generation of local-scale maps from limited remote sensing data. Leveraging the Google Earth Engine (GEE) computational power and the availability of high spatial resolution remote sensing data collected by Copernicus Sentinels, this study introduces the first detailed, provincial-scale wetland inventory map of one of the richest Canadian provinces in terms of wetland extent. In particular, multi-year summer Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Sentinel-1 and optical Sentinel-2 data composites were used to identify the spatial distribution of five wetland and three non-wetland classes on the Island of Newfoundland, covering an approximate area of 106,000 km2. The classification results were evaluated using both pixel-based and object-based random forest (RF) classifications implemented on the GEE platform. The results revealed the superiority of the object-based approach relative to the pixel-based classification for wetland mapping. Although the classification using multi-year optical data was more accurate compared to that of SAR, the inclusion of both types of data significantly improved the classification accuracies of wetland classes. In particular, an overall accuracy of 88.37% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.85 were achieved with the multi-year summer SAR/optical composite using an object-based RF classification, wherein all wetland and non-wetland classes were correctly identified with accuracies beyond 70% and 90%, respectively. The results suggest a paradigm-shift from standard static products and approaches toward generating more dynamic, on-demand, large-scale wetland coverage maps through advanced cloud computing resources that simplify access to and processing of the “Geo Big Data.” In addition, the resulting ever-demanding inventory map of Newfoundland is of great interest to and can be used by many stakeholders, including federal and provincial governments, municipalities, NGOs, and environmental consultants to name a few.

Despite recent advances of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in various computer vision tasks, their potential for classification of multispectral remote sensing images has not been thoroughly explored. In particular, the applications of deep CNNs using optical remote sensing data have focused on the classification of very high-resolution aerial and satellite data, owing to the similarity of these data to the large datasets in computer vision. Accordingly, this study presents a detailed investigation of state-of-the-art deep learning tools for classification of complex wetland classes using multispectral RapidEye optical imagery. Specifically, we examine the capacity of seven well-known deep convnets, namely DenseNet121, InceptionV3, VGG16, VGG19, Xception, ResNet50, and InceptionResNetV2, for wetland mapping in Canada. In addition, the classification results obtained from deep CNNs are compared with those based on conventional machine learning tools, including Random Forest and Support Vector Machine, to further evaluate the efficiency of the former to classify wetlands. The results illustrate that the full-training of convnets using five spectral bands outperforms the other strategies for all convnets. InceptionResNetV2, ResNet50, and Xception are distinguished as the top three convnets, providing state-of-the-art classification accuracies of 96.17%, 94.81%, and 93.57%, respectively. The classification accuracies obtained using Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) are 74.89% and 76.08%, respectively, considerably inferior relative to CNNs. Importantly, InceptionResNetV2 is consistently found to be superior compared to all other convnets, suggesting the integration of Inception and ResNet modules is an efficient architecture for classifying complex remote sensing scenes such as wetlands.

In this study, a new hierarchical object-based Random Forest (RF) classification approach is proposed for discriminating between different wetland classes in a study area located in the north eastern portion of the Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland and Labrador province, Canada. Specifically, multi-polarization and multi-frequency SAR data, including single polarized TerraSAR-X (HH), dual polarized L-band ALOS-2 (HH/HV), and fully polarized C-band RADARSAT-2 images, were applied in three different classification levels. The overall accuracy and kappa coefficient were determined in each classification level for evaluating the classification results. Importantly, an overall accuracy of94.82% was obtained for the final classified map in this study.

Despite recent research into the Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technique for wetland mapping worldwide, its capability has not yet been thoroughly investigated for Canadian wetland ecosystems. Accordingly, this study statistically analysed interferometric coherence and SAR backscatter variation in a study area located on the Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, consisting of various wetland classes, including bog, fen, marsh, swamp, and shallow-water. Specifically, multi-temporal L-band ALOS PALSAR-1, C-band RADARSAT-2, and X-band TerraSAR-X data were used to investigate the effect of SAR frequency and polarization, as well as temporal baselines on the coherence degree in the various wetland classes. SAR backscatter and coherence maps were also used as input features into an object-based Random Forest classification scheme to examine the contribution of these features to the overall classification accuracy. Our findings suggested that the temporal baseline was the most influential factor for coherence maintenance in herbaceous wetlands, especially for shorter wavelengths. In general, coherence was the highest in L-band and intermediate/low for both X- and C-band, depending on the wetland classes and temporal baseline. The Wilcoxon rank sum test at the 5% significance level found significant difference (P-value

An adaptive speckle reduction algorithm for Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) data, based on the combination of Gaussian Markov Random Field (GMRF) and Wavelet Edge Detection (WED) is proposed in this paper. The algorithm has three major steps: (a) first-time speckle reduction based on the GMRF model, (b) detail preservation using a WED approach, and (c) second-time speckle reduction using a least square approach based on pseudo span image. Both the GMRF and WED use the coherency matrix as the input, which has sensitive diagonal elements, namely T 11 , T 22 and T 33 corresponding to surface, double-bounce, and volume scattering, respectively. A key point in the proposed algorithm is that strong point targets are not affected by speckle phenomena and thus, they should be excluded from the de-speckling process. The proposed algorithm is applied to a full polarimetric C-band RADARSAT-2 data in the Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.

Detailed information on spatial distribution of wetland classes is crucial for monitoring this important productive ecosystem using advanced remote sensing tools and data. Although the potential of full- and dual-polarimetric (FP and DP) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data for wetland classification has been well examined, the capability of compact polarimetric (CP) SAR data has not yet been thoroughly investigated. This is of great significance, since the upcoming RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM), which will soon be the main source of SAR observations in Canada, will have CP mode as one of its main SAR configurations. This also highlights the necessity to fully exploit such important Earth Observation (EO) data by examining the similarities and dissimilarities between FP and CP SAR data for wetland mapping. Accordingly, this study examines and compares the discrimination capability of extracted features from FP and simulated CP SAR data between pairs of wetland classes. In particular, 13 FP and 22 simulated CP SAR features are extracted from RADARSAT-2 data to determine their discrimination capabilities both qualitatively and quantitatively in three wetland sites, located in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Seven of 13 FP and 15 of 22 CP SAR features are found to be the most discriminant, as they indicate an excellent separability for at least one pair of wetland classes. The overall accuracies of 87.89%, 80.67%, and 84.07% are achieved using the CP SAR data for the three wetland sites (Avalon, Deer Lake, and Gros Morne, respectively) in this study. Although these accuracies are lower than those of FP SAR data, they confirm the potential of CP SAR data for wetland mapping as accuracies exceed 80% in all three sites. The CP SAR data collected by RCM will significantly contribute to the efforts ongoing of conservation strategies for wetlands and monitoring changes, especially on large scales, as they have both wider swath coverage and improved temporal resolution compared to those of RADARSAT-2.

In this study, we evaluate the capability of Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technique for the monitoring wetland water level changes in the Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. This province is one of the richest Canadian provinces in terms of wetland expanse, yet these productive habitats remain poorly understood in this area. The InSAR technique is proven to be efficient in monitoring solid earth changes (e.g., earthquake and landslide). However, the use of such a technique for monitoring water level changes is underdeveloped and limited to particular pilot sites. In this paper, we use 5 SLC TerraSAR-X descending track and analyze them using repeat-pass SAR interferometry technique to monitor water level fluctuations of flooded vegetation.

Wetlands are important ecosystems around the world, although they are degraded due both to anthropogenic and natural process. Newfoundland is among the richest Canadian province in terms of different wetland classes. Herbaceous wetlands cover extensive areas of the Avalon Peninsula, which are the habitat of a number of animal and plant species. In this study, a novel hierarchical object-based Random Forest (RF) classification approach is proposed for discriminating between different wetland classes in a sub-region located in the north eastern portion of the Avalon Peninsula. Particularly, multi-polarization and multi-frequency SAR data, including X-band TerraSAR-X single polarized (HH), L-band ALOS-2 dual polarized (HH/HV), and C-band RADARSAT-2 fully polarized images, were applied in different classification levels. First, a SAR backscatter analysis of different land cover types was performed by training data and used in Level-I classification to separate water from non-water classes. This was followed by Level-II classification, wherein the water class was further divided into shallow- and deep-water classes, and the non-water class was partitioned into herbaceous and non-herbaceous classes. In Level-III classification, the herbaceous class was further divided into bog, fen, and marsh classes, while the non-herbaceous class was subsequently partitioned into urban, upland, and swamp classes. In Level-II and -III classifications, different polarimetric decomposition approaches, including Cloude-Pottier, Freeman-Durden, Yamaguchi decompositions, and Kennaugh matrix elements were extracted to aid the RF classifier. The overall accuracy and kappa coefficient were determined in each classification level for evaluating the classification results. The importance of input features was also determined using the variable importance obtained by RF. It was found that the Kennaugh matrix elements, Yamaguchi, and Freeman-Durden decompositions were the most important parameters for wetland classification in this study. Using this new hierarchical RF classification approach, an overall accuracy of up to 94% was obtained for classifying different land cover types in the study area.