Compact radar polarimetry for fire scar mapping and landcover classification

• Main Authors: Chen, H, Goodenough, D.G, Cloude, S.R
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computer vision and image processing techniques; Geography and cartography computing; Geophysical techniques and equipment; Instrumentation and techniques for geophysical, hydrospheric and lower atmosphere research; Optical, image and video signal processing; Other topics in Earth sciences; Radar equipment, systems and applications
• DOI: 10.1049/cp.2013.0186

Compact polarimetry (compact-pol) architecture is a new hybrid mode for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and is proposed for the future Canadian Radarsat Constellation Mission (RCM) and the future Japanese ALOS-2 mission. The Compact-pol mode transmits single circular polarization (left/right) and receives simultaneous coherent orthogonal linear polarizations. In this paper, we use Radarsat-2 C-band quad polarization (quad-pol) data to simulate RCM compactpol data, introduce useful compact-pol parameters using compact-pol decomposition theories, and show that the compact-pol mode is capable of maintaining important polarimetric information on forest structure and changes, even though there is the loss of information through projection of the complex scattering matrix of quad-pol on a single-pixel level. Examples are given to illustrate how to use the compact decomposition parameters for forestry applications. (4 pages)