Evaluating compact SAR polarimetry for tropical forest monitoring

Fully polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) or PolSAR has been proven useful for diverse applications related to environment. Nevertheless, problems are arising since satellite-borne PolSAR requires special arrangements on data acquisition and consumes higher energy for signal transmission. Complexity of data acquisition and analysis can be reduced using compact polarimetry. The technique has been demonstrated to some extent; however, tests on various environments are still required. This paper assesses compact polarimetry on a tropical forest fringe, especially to monitor expanding oil palm estate and forest disturbance, in comparison to fully polarimetric mode. PALSAR data of Manokwari, Indonesia, were collected from JAXA through RA4.1029 project. In this paper, linear 45 degrees transmission is evaluated to detect various land cover classes using Wishart supervised classifier. Tonal discrepancies between both polarimetric modes are evident, suggesting compact polarimetry has limitation to recover information contained in fully polarimetric mode. However, Wishart classification procedure indicates that compact polarimetry is still useful for mapping.