Recognition of Autumn Crop Based on Polsar Data and Feature Selection

Abstract

Optical remote sensed images have been intensively used to map global and regional agriculture information. However, few optical images could be collected due to cloud contamination during the crop growth period. Therefore, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images could be used to extract crop distribution since it is capable of acquiring data without regard to bad weather conditions. Although numerous studies have been successfully carried out to highlight the potential of SAR images in crop monitoring, there are still some problems to be solved. The high dimensionality of multi-temporal SAR images remains a major issue, classification using all features is limited to efficiency. In this study, a method of autumn crop recognition based on PolSAR data and feature selection was proposed. Using Radarsat-2 PolSAR images acquired during the autumn crop growing season, the optimal subset of features was obtained by 3 feature selection methods and 15 polarimetric target decomposition methods. With optimal feature subset and train samples, crops and other ground objects were classified by SVM. The classification result was assessed by test samples.