Corn mapping uisng multi-temporal fully and compact SAR data

Abstract

Corn is one of the most essential economic crops globally and is an important part of China's agricultural industry. Corn growth monitoring is helpful for agricultural land reallocation and production evaluation. The compact polarimetric (CP) SAR could be a good tool for large area surveillance as it overcomes the width limitation of fully-polarimetric (FP) SAR, whereas still inherits abundant information. To testify how CP SAR data behave in corn field mapping, four Radarsat-2 Fine Quad images were continuously acquired to simulate π/4 mode and hybrid mode CP SAR data. Indicators of scattering mechanisms defined by Stokes parameters are analyzed. Comparisons are made between FP and CP SAR data on backscattering coefficients as well. The decision tree is then adopted to extract corn field with temporal information. The results of CP SAR show similar accuracies with FP SAR, indicating good inheritances from FP SAR.