Forest type discrimination using polarimetric Radarsat 2 data

In the south of China, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) provides a powerful tool for forestry inventory because of its all-weather and all-day capabilities. Nevertheless previous single or dual polarization SAR data cannot meet the requirements of forest type classification. Polarimetric SAR data contained more information of targets and in this paper we investigated the capability of polarimetric Radarsat 2 data for forest type discrimination. Taking Zhazuo forest farm of Guizhou Province as study area, an 8-temporal field experiment was designed and used for polarimetric backscattering signatures analysis based on MIMICS model. Then two-temporal polarimetric Radarsat 2 data was analyzed to extract polarimetric variables for forest species discrimination, and then polarimetric decomposition and classification were carried out. Experiments prove that forest type can be discriminated using polarimetric Radarsat 2 data, but it is not very effective for forest species identification mainly due to the spatial resolution limitation. Polarimetric SAR data with higher resolution and more complicated classification methods are needed in the future.