NEW VEGETATION INDICES FOR FULL AND COMPACT POLARIMETRIC SAR DATA: IN PREPARATION FOR THE RADARSAT CONSTELLATION MISSION (RCM)

Abstract. In this paper, we present two radar vegetation indices for full-pol and compact-pol SAR data, respectively. Both are derived using the notion of a geodesic distance between observation and well-known scattering models available in the literature. While the full-pol version depends on a generalized volume scattering model, the compact-pol version uses the ideal depolariser to model the randomness in the vegetation. We have utilized the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) time-series data from the SAMPVEX16-MB campaign in the Manitoba region of Canada for comparing and assessing the indices in terms of the change in the biophysical parameters as well. The compact-pol data for comparison is simulated from the full-pol RCM time series. Both the indices show better performance at correlating with biophysical parameters such as Plant Area Index (PAI) and Volumetric Water Content (VWC) for wheat and soybean crops, in comparison to the state-of-art Radar Vegetation Index (RVI) of Kim and van Zyl. These indices are timely for the upcoming release of the data from the RCM, which will provide data in both full and compact-pol modes, aimed at better crop monitoring from space.