Simplified adaptive volume scattering model and scattering analysis of crops over agricultural fields using the RADARSAT-2 polarimetric synthetic aperture radar imagery

Abstract. A simplified adaptive volume scattering model (SAVSM) for RADARSAT-2 polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR), based on the n’th power sine and cosine functions, is developed to characterize the changes in crop phenology within the growing season. A three-component model-based decomposition (TCMD) with SAVSM is also implemented with the non-negative eigenvalue decomposition. Multitemporal RADARSAT-2 data acquired in southwestern Ontario, Canada, are used for validating the proposed TCMD-SAVSM. The TCMD-SAVSM is first compared with the adaptive model-based decomposition proposed by Arii et al. in which ∇fv is set to 0.01, demonstrating that TCMD-SAVSM not only consumes much less computing time but also the decomposed surface and double-bounce components are also more representative of the land cover reality. Using the percentage of power of the remainder matrix <0.001 as the evaluation criterion, the SAVSM achieved the best performance in corn, soybean and wheat fields compared with other popular volume scattering models (VSMs), with the highest mean and lowest standard deviation. It suggests that the SAVSM is a suitable VSM for describing seasonal changes of crop fields. Last, the decomposed surface, double-bounce and volume scattering components of wheat, soybean and corn at various growth stages are analyzed at the individual crop level, and the results demonstrate that their variations are in concert with the crop’s phenological development.