Comparison of water cloud models with different layers for rice yield estimation from a single TerraSAR image

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the estimation of rice yield from Water Cloud Models (WCM) with different layers by a single X-band (8–12 GHz) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image, from a satellite named TerraSAR. A simulated annealing (SA) algorithm, with a ‘leave-one-out’ cross-validation method, was applied. The results were related to actual rice parameters, with a coefficient of determination (R 2) of 0.6059, which not only demonstrated that a single-layer WCM was better than a double-layer WCM for grain number estimation, but also indicated the potential to estimate rice production from a single SAR image. A comparison of estimates indicated that the single-layer WCM overcame insufficiencies that existed in the double-layer WCM. The range of backscattering coefficients from the model was also discussed.