SAR applications in agriculture A comparison of steep and shallow mode (30° and 53° incidence angles) data

Abstract

The multi-date data set discussed in this paper was acquired over an agricultural site near Melfort, Saskatchewan, in 1983. The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data are C-band (5.26GHz) with vertical polarization and two incidence angles, 53° and 30°. A comparison between the data at the two incidence angles shows that the pixel statistics of the image data are different for the two angles. Examination of the statistical distribution shows that the 53° data are more influenced by vegetation than the 30° angle data. The classification accuracy of the 53° data was higher than that obtained with the 30° data. In addition, the classification accuracies obtained using multi-date combinations with the 53° data were superior to accuracies obtained using multi-angle combinations (53°+ 30°). An overall improvement in classification accuracy was obtained using a post segmentation field classifier.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

S. POIRIER†

Present address: Canada Centre for Remote Sensing, 2464 Sheffield Road, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1A OY7.