Crop Harvest Monitoring Using Polarimetric SAR Parameters

Timely detection of harvested fields is important for insurance companies. In this study, polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) parameters derived from dual-polarization Sentinel-1 sensor have been tested for harvest monitoring over corn and soybean fields. Intensity at VH polarization, volume scattering derived from M-Chi decomposition and S 0 and S 1 elements of Scattering Matrix have been tested. Harvest maps derived from SAR have been compared with the results derived from Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) which was extracted from Sentinel-2 imageries. Very promising and close results derived from both optical and SAR sensors. This study demonstrated that combination of SAR and optical sensors could be used to produce dense time-series of crop harvest maps.