Agricultural crop monitoring with C-band polarimetric SAR features: analysis of dual-pol and compact-pol features

Abstract

Sets of features derived from radar images acquired at C-band over five different crops are analyzed to assess their sensitivity to crop growth. The study is focused on features available in dual-pol and compact-pol modes because these polarimetric modes keep the same resolution and coverage of single-pol systems. It is found that most of the features analyzed present sensitivity to the development of plants, providing complementary information in some cases. Crops like canola, pea, and oat exhibit good correlations between radar-derived features and optical indices (normalized difference vegetation index [NDVI] and leaf area index), with some particularly high correlations in specific cases, like for wheat with NDVI. The worst results were obtained for barley in the dataset analyzed.