Wheat Crop Mapping by Using ASAR AP Data

The purpose of this paper is to assess the use of C-band HH/VV backscatter ratio for mapping winter wheat. This paper analyzes two temporal series of images acquired in 2006 and 2007 by the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) system in alternating polarization (AP) mode, over an agricultural site located in southern Italy. Results on test data show that classification accuracies between 75% and 80% can be achieved by using a single ASAR image, acquired during the peak of the wheat-growing season. To achieve accuracies close to 90%, a spatial averaging at field scale is necessary.