While they preserve some of polarimetric information as those that would be recorded by a full polarimetric (FP) radar sensor, compact polarimetry (CP) is relevant for system constraints reduction. This study focuses on the comparison between the FP mode, the CP mode as π/4 mode and the dual polarimetric mode (DP) of ALOS PALSAR. The SVM (Support Vector Machine) algorithm has been implemented as it allows to take into account numerous and heterogeneous polarimetric indices, such as the intensity channels, the degree of coherence between different polarisation, the H/a/α parameters or the Freeman parameters obtained from the corresponding target decomposition methods. The results obtained with AIRSAR full polarimetric data over a Polynesian island to provide a global cartography are discussed and compared to the results obtained with the simulation of the π/4 modes and the DP mode. It is shown that the contribution of the different polarimetric indicators improve significantly the classification accuracy with respect to the π/4 mode and the DP mode of PALSAR.