Comparison of water cloud models with different layers for rice yield estimation from a single TerraSAR image

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the estimation of rice yield from Water Cloud Models (WCM) with different layers by a single X-band (8–12 GHz) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image, from a satellite named TerraSAR. A simulated annealing (SA) algorithm, with a ‘leave-one-out’ cross-validation method, was applied. The results were related to actual rice parameters, with a coefficient of determination (R²) of 0.6059, which not only demonstrated that a single-layer WCM was better than a double-layer WCM for grain number estimation, but also indicated the potential to estimate rice production from a single SAR image. A comparison of estimates indicated that the single-layer WCM overcame insufficiencies that existed in the double-layer WCM. The range of backscattering coefficients from the model was also discussed.

Acknowledgments

SAR image pre-treatment was conducted by Shuli Wang. We acknowledge Prosper Washaya, Shu Ye and Xiaoran Lv for grammatical help, and Maokun Li, an Associate Professor at Tsinghua University for assistance in preparation of the manuscript. We would like to thank Editage (www.editage.com) for their writing support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Zhejiang Natural Science Foundation (ZJNSF), under Grant [LGN20D010001], and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, under Grant [41431174, 41401427, and 61471358].