Confocal scanning laser microscopy (CSLM) is used to produce images of the two- and three-dimensional distribution and geometry of pore space in a reservoir sandstone and measure the 2D distribution of pore throat radii. Nondestructive serial sectioning of the rock using laser light at 100% illumination, combined with image thresholding and histogram equalization techniques allow the pore volume structure of the uppermost 100 μm of the sample to be reconstructed. Negative imaging of the pore volume gave superior depth and feature resolution compared to positive (reflection) imaging. Artefacts encountered in applying classical Medial Axial Transforms to CSLM images include branch networks dominated by coordination numbers of 3. Skeletonization using Euclidean distance maps gives increased accuracy in the description of the pore network. Measured pore throat size distribution in the rock is strongly exponential and described by the expression y =219 e −0.25 x where y is the number of pore throats.

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Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems such as ALOS-PALSAR and Radarsat-2 can operate in many different modes. The use of additional polarizations may require additional time and operating power and it is important to justify this by increased classification accuracy. A fully polarimetric, dual frequency AIRSAR scene from a rice-growing area in Japan was classified by a maximum likelihood method based on the Wishart distribution. It is shown how the measured covariance matrices determine the separation accuracy between two classes. Closed form expressions are then given for the expected single-look accuracy of the maximum likelihood classifier as a function of the class covariance matrices. This can be used to quickly compare the high spatial resolution classification performance of different polarimetric systems to decide upon a particular operating mode.