Rice scattering mechanism analysis and classification using polarimetric RADARSAT-2

China is the largest rice producer in the world. Guizhou province is an important rice growing area in the southwest of China. However, rice monitoring with remote sensing data has great difficulties in this region due to its perennial cloud-coverage weather and undulating terrain. With the emergence of polarimetric SAR data and state of art methods for polarization information extraction, rice monitoring in this region is more promising. In this study, multi-temporal RADARSAT-2 polarimetric SAR data set was acquired in Guizhou, China. The Freeman-Durden, Cloude-Pottier and the Touzi decompositions were used for classification and rice scattering mechanism analysis.