Development of a Fusion Vegetation Index Using Full-PolSAR and Multispectral Data

Abstract

The vegetation index is a crucial parameter in many biophysical studies of vegetation, and is also a valuable content in ecological processes researching. The OVIs (Optical Vegetation Index) that of using multispectral and hyperspectral data have been widely investigated in the literature, while the RVI (Radar Vegetation Index) that of considering volume scattering measurement has been paid relatively little attention. Also, there was only some efforts have been put to fuse the OVI with the RVI as an integrated vegetation index. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel FVI (Fusion Vegetation Index) that uses multispectral and full-PolSAR (Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar) data. By fusing a NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) of RapidEye and an RVI of C-band Radarsat-2, we demonstrated that the proposed FVI has higher separability in different vegetation types than only with OVI and RVI. Also, the experimental results show that the proposed index not only has information on the vegetation greenness of the NDVI, but also has information on the canopy structure of the RVI. Based on this preliminary result, since the vegetation monitoring is more detailed, it could be possible in various application fields; this synergistic FVI will be further developed in the future.