The ALOS Kyoto & Carbon Initiative is an international endeavour initialized by NASDA, with the main objective to support information needs raised by the UNFCCC Kyoto Protocol and by the international global carbon cycle science community, by provision of systematic, consistent, repetitive and regional scale data of the global forest cover. Of central importance for the Initiative is a Dedicate...

The paper reports on experimental analysis of the spatial statistics (texture), as measured by wavelet frames in Lband SAR observations of tropical forest. Signatures are used to characterize the dependences of the texture measures on scale and polarization state. For detected data, experiments performed using a full resolution (12.5 m) JERS-1 image confirm that textural features provide good s...

Among the several applications that will take advantage of the newly available data from the ALOS PALSAR instrument, considerable interest is in the peculiar features that derive from the penetration and polarimetric capabilities of the system. These capabilities, new for a single spaceborne sensor, need specific software tools for the processing of the different acquisition modes. This paper p...

Recently, the forest observation using the spaceborne sensor becomes a top issue in the carbon monitoring. Covering more than 20% of the global terrestrial areas, forests are rapidly decreasing, corresponding to 20% carbon dioxide release from the land. Deforestation and forest degradation mainly occurred in the developing country. L-band SAR is sensitive for monitoring the forest biomass, fore...

 SIR-C quad-pol MLC data acquired in 1994 and ALOS PALSAR quad-pol and dual pol SLC data acquired in 2006 and 2007 over several Indian sites have been processed using PolSARpro software for classification of various land features. The land features include ocean, clear water, settlements, agriculture fields, arid lands, grown and young forest, hilly terrain, mangrove forest, etc. Both unsuperv...

In order to estimate the sea-ice thickness distribution in the seasonal ice zone (SIZ), we are developing the algorithm with PALSAR data. As a preliminary step, airborne Polarimetric and Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (Pi-SAR) observation, conducted in the southern Sea of Okhotsk in February 2005, was examined to validate the retrieval of ice thickness distribution from L-band SAR. In...

A study on sea oil slick observation by means of Lband polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is accomplished. It is based on the different sea surface scattering mechanism expected with and without surface slicks. Polarimetric measurements are processed by means of a simple and very effective filtering technique which is electromagnetically based on the Mueller scattering matrix. Mor...

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been recognized as a powerful tool for geological feature detection. This work introduces a new approach using Particle Swarm Optimization automatically detected geological features from PALSAR SAR data. The result shows that the new formula based on Particle Swarm Optimization can be delineated lineament features in PALSAR data. The new approach using Particl...