Crop Classification Based on Temporal Information Using Sentinel-1 SAR Time-Series Data

Abstract

With the increasing temporal resolution of space-borne SAR, large amounts of intensity data are now available for continues land observations. Previous researches proved the effectiveness of multitemporal SAR in land classification, but the characterizations of temporal information were still inadequate. In this paper, we proposed a crop classification scheme, which made full use of multitemporal SAR backscattering responses. In this method, the temporal intensity models were established by the K-means clustering method. The intensity vectors were treated as input features, and the mean intensity vectors of cluster centers were regarded as the temporal models. The temporal models summarized the backscatter evolutions of crops and were utilized as the criterion for crop discrimination. The spectral similarity value (SSV) measure was introduced from hyperspectral image processing for temporal model matching. The unlabeled pixel was assigned to the class to which the temporal model with the highest similarity belonged. Two sets of Sentinel-1 SAR time-series data were used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The comparison between SSV and other measures demonstrated the superiority of SSV in temporal model matching. Compared with the decision tree (DT) and naive Bayes (NB) classifiers, the proposed method achieved the best overall accuracies in both VH and VV bands. For most crops, it either obtained the best accuracies or achieved comparable accuracies to the best ones, which illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.