Abstract-A new methodology to estimate the growth stages of agricultural crops using the time series of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images is proposed. The methodology is based on the complex Wishart classifier and both phenological intervals and training areas are identified measuring the distances among polarimetric covariance matrices obtained from the time series of PolSAR data. Consequently, the computation of PolSAR features, which is the main step of state-of-the-art methods, is no longer needed, and the proposed approach can be applied in the same way to any crop type. Experiments undertaken on a dense time series of fully polarimetric C-band RADARSAT-2 images, collected at incidence angles ranging from 23• to 39• , in ascending/descending orbit passes, demonstrate that the proposed methodology can be successfully applied to retrieve the phenological stages of four different crop types. In addition, the effect of combining beams corresponding to different sensor's configurations has been evaluated, showing that it affects the retrieval accuracies. Validation with ground data shows the following: overall accuracy is between 54% and 86%; producer's accuracy (PA) and user's accuracy (UA) range between 21% and 100% and between 33% and 100%, respectively.

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The sensitivity of COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) incoherent dual-polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data to the rice growth cycle is investigated here. State-of-the-art scattering models are used, together with a time series of 24 CSK SAR images collected in Mekong Delta, Vietnam in 2014, to interpret the behaviour of multi-polarization features with respect to the different phenological stages that characterize rice growth. Experimental results show the multi-polarization features sensitivity with respect to rice growth cycle and witness that a joint use of the co-polarized channels (i.e. co-polarized ratio or correlation between co-polarized channels) allows identifying scattering behaviours that are compatible with four stages of the rice growth cycle

Abstract-In this paper, a new look at the electromagnetic field in a reverberating chamber (RC) is presented. It follows the fractional Brownian motion (fBm) model and exploits the Hurst parameter as the key parameter to discriminate among various RC configurations. Experiments accomplished at the RC of the Università di Napoli Parthenope, formerly Istituto Universitario Navale (IUN), confirm the physical soundness of the proposed model.

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