In-season crop classification using elements of the Kennaugh matrix derived from polarimetric RADARSAT-2 SAR data

Accurate spatio-temporal classification of crops is of prime importance for in-season crop monitoring. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data provides diverse physical information about crop morphology. In the present work, we propose a day-wise and a time-series approach for crop classification using full-polarimetric SAR data. In this context, the 4 × 4 real Kennaugh matrix representation of a full-polarimetric SAR data is utilized, which can provide valuable information about various morphological and dielectric attributes of a scatterer. The elements of the Kennaugh matrix are used as the parameters for the classification of crop types using the random forest and the extreme gradient boosting classifiers.The time-series approach uses data patterns throughout the whole growth period, while the day-wise approach analyzes the PolSAR data from each acquisition into a single data stack for training and validation. The main advantage of this approach is the possibility of generating an intermediate crop map, whenever a SAR acquisition is available for any particular day. Besides, the day-wise approach has the least climatic influence as compared to the time series approach. However, as time-series data retains the crop growth signature in the entire growth cycle, the classification accuracy is usually higher than the day-wise data.Within the Joint Experiment for Crop Assessment and Monitoring (JECAM) initiative, in situ measurements collected over the Canadian and Indian test sites and C-band full-polarimetric RADARSAT-2 data are used for the training and validation of the classifiers. Besides, the sensitivity of the Kennaugh matrix elements to crop morphology is apparent in this study. The overall classification accuracies of 87.75% and 80.41% are achieved for the time-series data over the Indian and Canadian test sites, respectively. However, for the day-wise data, a ∼6% decrease in the overall accuracy is observed for both the classifiers.