SAR Speckle Filtering and Agriculture Field Size: Development of SAR Data Processing Best Practices for the JECAM SAR Inter-Comparison Experiment

Utilizing Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors for crop inventory and condition monitoring offers many advantages, particularly the ability to collect data under cloudy conditions. The JECAM SAR Inter-Comparison Experiment is a multi-year, multi-partner project that aims to compare global methods for SAR crop monitoring and inventory, and Leaf Area Index (LAI) and biomass retrieval. Data sets of SAR imagery including RADARSAT-2 and Sentinel-1 are being prepared for this experiment and it is important to develop best practices to ensure consistency across the data sets. This paper outlines the speckle filter testing results based upon changing filter types and window sizes in comparison with changing field size. In general, it was found that the adaptive Touzi filter resulted in the highest overall classification accuracies for all field sizes. It was also found that there may be importance to speckle filter window size in relation to agriculture field size for other filter types.