Evaluation of Convair-580 and Simulated Radarsat-2 Polarimetric SAR for Forest Change Detection

Radarsat-2 is a significant advancement in technological capability over Radarsat-1 in terms of better spatial resolution and polarimetric parameters. To determine the effectiveness of C-band polarimetry of Radarsat-2 data for applications of forest typing, structure recognition and disturbance detection, C-band polarimetric data from Environment Canada's Convair-580 were acquired. We also obtained simulated Radarsat-2 data, a degraded version of the Convair-580 data. Polarimetric techniques, such as polarimetric filtering and decompositions, were performed on these data sets. The underlying backscatter phenomena were examined and the results were compared. Historical fire disturbance patterns were detected clearly with the Convair-580 data by using the Entropy- alpha decomposition technique. Moreover, the combination of the surface scattering and volume scattering decompositions showed results in obtaining clearcut information in forested areas. By using the simulated Radarsat-2 data, we gained an insight into what could be expected from real Radarsat-2 quad-pol products. Even though the simulated Radarsat-2 data had more noise than Convair-580 data, the fire scars in the same area were still detectable.