the objective of this work was to analyze the potential use of sar polarimetric images from the terrasar-x sensor system, at stripmap mode, to map land use and land cover in sw brazilian amazon. amplitude images at polarizations ahh, avv, a, derived from the co-variance matrix, as well as the entropy aentropia, derived from the decomposition of targets by eigenvalues, are parts of the datasets investigated individually or in combined form. two classifiers were used: the first is based on statistical functions of maximum likelihood (maxver), and the second is the contextual method (context). the thematic results from these classifications were evaluated by a confusion matrix and by the kappa index. summarizing we can state that the components a and aentropia, gave a significant contribution to the image classification procedure, considering specially the context method, whose performance reached 78% of global accuracy and a kappa index of 0.70.
