Comparison of ALOS PALSAR RVI and Landsat TM NDVI for forest area mapping

Author

Ling, F. ; Li, Z. ; Chen, E. ; Wang, Q.

Author_Institution

Inst. of Forest Resources Inf. Tech., Chinese Acad. of Forestry, Beijing, China

fYear

2009

fDate

26-30 Oct. 2009

Firstpage

132

Lastpage

135

Abstract

The objective of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of the radar vegetation index (RVI) derived from ALOS PALSAR full polarimetric data for forest area mapping. Comparison was made between RVI and NDVI of Landsat TM data. After examining of the index maps and the corresponding histograms, forest/non-forest segmentation was performed by unsupervised classification and by threshold method. The results show that RVI is much better in this kind of application. Considering the data acquisition capability, full polarimetric SAR data are quite promising for forest monitoring.

Keywords

data acquisition; geophysical signal processing; radar imaging; remote sensing by radar; synthetic aperture radar; vegetation; vegetation mapping; ALOS PALSAR RVI; Landsat TM NDVI; Landsat TM data; NDVI comparison; SAR data; data acquisition capability; forest area mapping; forest monitoring; forest/nonforest segmentation; full polarimetric data; histograms; radar vegetation index; threshold method; unsupervised classification; Data acquisition; Matrix decomposition; Radar imaging; Radar polarimetry; Remote monitoring; Remote sensing; Satellites; Symmetric matrices; Synthetic aperture radar; Vegetation mapping; ALOS; Forest; NDVI; PALSAR; RVI;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Synthetic Aperture Radar, 2009. APSAR 2009. 2nd Asian-Pacific Conference on

Conference_Location

Xian, Shanxi

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-2731-4

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-2732-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/APSAR.2009.5374137

Filename

5374137