Mapping forest fire scars with simulated RCM compact-pol data

This paper gives results of our assessment of the potential for using Radarsat Constellation Mission (RCM) C-band compact polarimetry (compact-pol) for detecting historical forest fire scars. We first summarize the compact-pol decomposition theory we developed for retrieving useful geophysical parameters from compact-pol data. We then demonstrate a combination of time series filtering and spatial filtering to reduce speckle noise in the geophysical parameters. Next we describe a rule-based classifier and show an application example based on a time series of simulated compact-pol data from Radarsat-2 Fine Quad-pol (FQ) mode to detect a 10-year old fire scar in our study site. Our study results showed that even though there was a loss of polarimetric information through projection of a complex scattering matrix of quad-pol data on a single-pixel level, the compact-pol mode was capable of maintaining important polarimetric information and detecting the test forest fire scar. Finally we look at the effect of non-circular transmit polarization on key decomposition parameters and discuss the effects of imperfect transmit polarization on classification performance.