Abstract
Abstract. Remote sensing plays a key role in monitoring and assessing environmental changes. Because of its special imaging characteristics such as high-resolution, capabilities to obtain data in all weather conditions and sensitivity to geometrical and dielectric properties of the features, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology has become a powerful technique to detect small scale changes related to earth surface.SAR images contain the information of both phase and intensity in different modes like single, dual and full polarimetric states which are important in order to extract information about various targets. In this study we investigate phenological changes in an agricultural region using high-resolution X-band SAR data. The case study is located in Doroud region of Lorestan province, west of Iran. The purpose is to investigate the ability of copolar and interferometric coherence extracted from TanDEM-X dual polarimetry (HH/VV) in bistatic StripMap mode for tracking the phenological changes of crops during growing season. The data include 11 images acquired between 12.06.2012 and 02.11.2012 and 6 images acquired between 30.05.2013 and 04.08.2013 in the CoSSC format. Results show that copolar coherence is almost able to follow phenological changes but interferometric coherence has a near constant behaviour with fluctuations mainly related to baseline variations.
Highlights
Agricultural monitoring is important as it is directly related to human food supply
In recent years much attention has been paid on monitoring phenological changes and classification of different crop types using remote sensing observations
In this research we investigated the behaviour of different copolar and interferometric coherence values over agricultural fields
Summary
Agricultural monitoring is important as it is directly related to human food supply. In recent years much attention has been paid on monitoring phenological changes and classification of different crop types using remote sensing observations Koppe et al, (2012) investigated the behaviour of X-band backscattering values over rice fields in different phenological states Zhao et al, (2014) discussed about the feasibility of C- and X-band polarimetric SAR images for crop harvest pattern recognition. In this research we evaluated polarimetric and interferometric coherence for monitoring phenological changes of different crop types. For this purpose we used TanDEM-X dual polarized (HH/VV) images in bistatic StripMap mode, provided by German aerospace centre (DLR). In order to study the agricultural fields, a classification was first done to distinguish different crop types, and time series of coherence values were plotted for each crop. A comparison was done between copolar and interferometric coherences
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
