A Generalized Volume Scattering Model-Based Vegetation Index From Polarimetric SAR Data

In this letter, we propose a novel vegetation index from polarimetric synthetic-aperture radar (PolSAR) data using the generalized volume scattering model. The geodesic distance between two Kennaugh matrices projected on a unit sphere proposed by Ratha et al. is used in this letter. This distance is utilized to compute a similarity measure between the observed Kennaugh matrix and generalized volume scattering models. A factor is estimated corresponding to the ratio of the minimum to the maximum geodesic distances between the observed Kennaugh matrix and the set of elementary targets: trihedral, cylinder, dihedral, and narrow dihedral. This factor is then scaled and multiplied with the similarity measure to obtain the novel vegetation index. The proposed vegetation index is compared with the radar vegetation index (RVI) proposed by Kim and van Zyl. A time series of RADARSAT-2 data acquired during the Soil Moisture Active Passive Validation Experiment 2016 (SMAPVEX16-MB) campaign in Manitoba, Canada, is used to assessing the proposed RVI.