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

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.