IDENTIFICATION OF RICE CROP USING ENVISAT ASAR IN FUZHOU, FUJIAN PROVINCE, CHINA

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is anticipated to be the dominant high-resolution remote sensing data source for agricultural applications in tropical and subtropical regions due to its independent from cloud cover. ENVISAT-1 ASAR is the most advanced satellite radar-imaging instrument, its capabilities include beam steering for acquiring images with different incidence angles, duel polarization and wide swath coverage. Agricultural crop inventory based on remote sensed data will be improved greatly by ASAR’s new capabilities. In this paper, multi-temporal ASAR alternative polarization data are used for the identification of rice crop in Fujian province. A procedure has been developed using multi-date ASAR data for rice crop identification. The procedure comprises two parts: data preprocessing and classification of multi-date data for rice field. Some novel methods are applied in image preprocessing such as correlation matching for image co-registration and multi-channel filtering for speckle suppression. Object-oriented classifier was used for classification. By adopting the procedure, classification accuracy of 90% was achieved in the test sites with multi-temporal Envisat ASAR data.