Paddy crop monitoring using microwave remote sensing technique

Abstract

This paper investigates the suitability of using airborne SAR images from the GlobeSAR mission for monitoring of growth stages of paddy crops. A large paddy plantation area in Kedah state, Malaysia, was selected for the study. Simple ground‐truth measurements were conducted at the same time as the flight mission. In general, the paddy growth pattern can be divided into three major stages, and the preliminary study of the acquired single channel grey level SAR images indicates that the GlobeSAR images have a great potential for monitoring of the different growth stages of paddy crops. Future work will further explore microwave remote sensing techniques for paddy crop monitoring using images from RADARSAT and JERS‐1.