CROP CLASSIFICATION BASED ON IMAGE SEGMENTATION AND PHENOLOGICAL

SIMILARITY USING SAR IMAGERY

Lin Chena, Gangqiang Ana, Minfeng Xin*a, b, Gengke Laia

a
School of Resources and Environment, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China,
IGARSS 2021 - 2021 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium | 978-1-6654-0369-6/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/IGARSS47720.2021.9554720

Chengdu, Sichuan 611731, China

b
Yangtze Delta Region Institute (Huzhou), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China,
Huzhou 313001, China
*Corresponding author. E-mail address: xingminfeng@uestc.edu.cn (M.X.)

ABSTRACT laborious. Instead, remote sensing technology provides an

effective means for agricultural dynamic monitoring under a
large area. In addition, due to the unique and efficient
Crop yield is a key factor in agricultural production
capacity to collect spatial variation information, remote
management and agricultural policy formulation, which
sensing technology is widely used in agricultural monitoring
affects the stability of the country and society. Therefore,
[1, 2]. Compared with optical remote sensing, due to the high
accessing the spatial distribution of crops in real time is very
penetration of synthetic aperture radar (SAR), it can penetrate
important. In this study, multi-temporal RADARSAT-2 fine
clouds and mist without affected by weather conditions,
beam quad-polarized SAR data was obtained, and a crop
which makes all-weather agricultural monitoring feasible [4,
classification method based on similarity analysis of
5].
phenological features and image segmentation technology
Compared with single or dual polarization images, full
was proposed. The main idea of this method is to construct a
polarization images contain more target polarization
standard phenological feature sequence (SPFS) based on
information [6]. In order to analyze and understand the
backscatter coefficient and Cloude decomposition parameters
scattering mechanism of ground targets, polarimetric
for each crop by using the training data, and then the
decomposition of full-polarization SAR imagery has
similarity coefficient between the segmented test data and the
gradually proved to be an effective method [7, 8]. In addition,
phenological sequence of each crop is calculated to judge the
multi-temporal data can be used to extract the variation
type of ground objects. The results show that the overall
information of crop scattering features with time series within
classification accuracy based on block scale reached to
a crop growth cycle, and further improve the accuracy of
76.06%, which indicates that the phenological features and
classification [5, 9]. In terms of classification scale,
image segmentation is beneficial for accuracy improving in
traditional researches mainly focus on crop classification at
crop classification. And the multi-temporal SAR data own
pixel scale. In contrast, the object-oriented classification
great potential in agricultural monitoring.
method based on image segmentation can treat the pixels in
the same segmentation object as homogeneous classification
Index Terms—Multi-temporal SAR data, Polarimetric
objects [10]. And previous studies have demonstrated the
decomposition, Backscatter coefficient, Phenological feature
superiority of object-based image analysis [10, 11].
sequences, Image segmentation
In this study, the main objective is to evaluate the
potential of multi-temporal SAR data on crop classification
1. INTRODUCTION by combining image segmentation and phenological
similarity.
Crop production is an essential part of human life. The yield
and quality of crops will impact the operation of country and
society directly. Furthermore, obtaining the spatial 2. MATERIALS
distribution of various crops in real time is of significant
importance in agricultural production management and 2.1. Study Area
agricultural policy making [1-3]. And crop classification, one
of the most important foundations of agricultural monitoring, The study targets a rectangular area measuring 12.2 km (east
can play an important role in crop yield estimation, growth to west) × 12.6 km (north to south), which (the centrality at
monitoring and planting area extraction [2, 3]. 42°51’ N, 81°32’ W) is located in the southeastern Ontario,
Traditionally, crop category information is mainly Canada. The main crops in target area were soybean, wheat
obtained through field surveys, which is time-consuming and and corn.

978-1-6654-0369-6/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE 5925 IGARSS 2021

Authorized licensed use limited to: Carnegie Mellon Libraries. Downloaded on May 02,2023 at 11:36:35 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 The training samples were collected from field
observation, and the corresponding crop types of different
fields were recorded. The validation samples generated from
Landsat-8 optical remote sensing satellite images in the same
area, and the crop types of validation samples were obtained
by visual interpretation. A total of 614 verification pixels
were selected.
2.2. RADARSAT-2 Data
RADARSAT-2 is equipped with a C-band sensor with the
center frequency of about 5.4 GHz. Five fine quad polarized
RADARSAT-2 images covering the study area from April to
September 2015 were acquired in this study. The details of
these five images are shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Collected RADARSAT-2 data
Resolution
Acquired Beam Orbit (Look
(Range
Date modes direction)
×Azimuth)
20150412
20150506
Fine Ascending
20150717 5.2 m×7.6 m
Quad-Pol (Right)
20150810
20150903
RADARSAT-2 images were processed using SNAP 7.0
as follows: (1) image registration; (2) radiometric correction;
(3) polarimetric decomposition (Cloude); (4) speckle filtering
(Lee filter with 5×5 window size); (5) terrain-correction,
projection transformation and resampling (10 m×10 m). After
preprocessing, multi-temporal backscatter coefficient images
and Cloude decomposition parameter images were obtained.
3. METHODOLOGY
The method of this study is introduced as follows. Firstly, the
SAR data were preprocessed and the feature parameters were
extracted. Then the standard phenological feature sequence
(SPFS) of different crops was constructed based on
backscatter coefficient and Cloude decomposition parameters
using training samples. Thirdly, the correlation between the
phenological feature sequences of pixel or segmented region
and SPFS of different crops was compared to determine the
classification of crops. Finally, the classification accuracy of
crops was evaluated based on the validation samples.
3.1. Cloude Decomposition
Cloude and Pottier proposed an eigenvector decomposition
method based on coherent matrix T in 1986. This method
includes all scattering mechanisms and has the advantage of
maintaining eigenvalues under different polarization bases
[12]. Cloude decomposition can decompose the target
correlation matrix into three weighted mutually orthogonal
5926
Authorized licensed use limited to: Carnegie Mellon Libraries. Downloaded on May 02,2023 at 11:36:35 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
correlation matrices, which corresponding to three scattering
processes: unidirectional scattering, cross-scattering and two-
way scattering. Through the Cloude decomposition, three sets
of eigenvalues and eigenvectors can be obtained. Based on
these parameters, polarization entropy ‘H’, average scattering
angle ‘α’, and anti-entropy ‘A’ are defined [12].
3.2. Image Segmentation
Image segmentation is an effective algorithm for noise
removal [13, 14]. The segmentation method can segment the
pixels of the image into many segmentation bodies. For
remote sensing image of the agriculture region, each
segmentation body represents a land parcel, and the pixels in
each segmentation body are homogenous. Through
subsequent image processing such as classification and target
recognition, every segmentation body can be considered as a
kind of ground object.
In this study, edge and full lambda schedule are used for
segmentation and merging. The merging algorithm is used to
merge the segmented bodies to reduce the number of
segmented volumes. All the combinations of 2 segmentation
scales (30, 35) and 2 merging scales (90, 95) were tested.
After statistics of classification accuracy, the segmentation
scale and merging scale were set to 30 and 95 respectively.
3.3. Construct SPFS of Different Crops
Based on the training data (obtained by field observation), the
mean values of backscatter coefficient (HH, HV, VV) and
Cloude parameters (H, α, A) of various crop types on
different dates were calculated, it should be noted that α was
divided by 100 based on the original data. The SPFS of
different crops were constructed based on backscattering
coefficient (HH, HV, and VV), Cloude parameters (H, α, A)
and both two kinds of parameters respectively. A total of
three sets of SPFS were obtained, and each set of SPFS
contains four types of crops’ phenological features.
3.4. Crop Classification and Accuracy Verification
The datasets used for classification included Multi-temporal
Sigma Images (MSI), Multi-temporal Cloude Images (MCI),
MSI+MCI, and S[MSI+MCI], in which S[MSI+MCI] was
obtained by performing image segmentation on MSI+MCI.
According to the different datasets used, different SPFS was
selected. Then Pearson Correlation Coefficient (r) was used
to calculate the correlation between phenological features of
each pixel in study area and phenological features of various
crops in SPFS. And the crop type corresponding to the largest
coefficient is the type of the pixel. It should be noted that
when S[MSI+MCI] was used, the phenological features
sequence of the test plot was obtained from the mean value
of the segmented sub regions. When using other data, pixel-
based values would be used.
 In this study, based on the classification results of test
samples, the overall accuracy (OA) and kappa coefficient
calculated from the confusion matrix were used to evaluate
the classification efficiency of different SAR images [3].

4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

4.1. Phenological Features Parameters Time Series

Variation Diagram

The time series diagrams of backscatter coefficient (HH, HV, (a) (b)
and VV) and Cloude parameters (H, α, A) of various crop
types were obtained (Figure 1). The vertical axis represents
the mean values of different parameters based on training
samples, and the horizontal axis represents the SAR image
acquisition date.

(c) (d)

Corn Soybean Wheat Others

Figure 2. Classification result map based on similarity
analysis of phenological features (a) MSI classification map;
(b) MCI classification map; (c) MSI+MCI classification map;
(d) S[MSI+MCI] classification map.

Table 2. Classification results on different datasets and scales

processing Accuracy Kappa
Image data
unit (%) coefficient
MSI pixel 56.51 0.4193
MCI pixel 66.94 0.5447
MSI+MCI pixel 72.64 0.6287
S[MCI+MSI] block 76.06 0.6746

4.3. Comparison of Classification Results

From Figure 2, compared with MSI and MCI classification

Figure 1. Phenological feature parameters time series
variation diagram.
4.2. Crop Classification Based on Similarity Analysis of
Phenological Features
Based on different datasets and scales, the classification
maps of MSI, MCI, MSI+MCI and S[MSI+MCI] are shown
in Figure 2, and the classification accuracy is shown in Table
2.
map, the classification map obtained by combining scattering
features with polarization decomposition features (MSI+MCI)
is better, and the overall classification accuracy is 72.64%.
This is because the MSI+MCI image contains more feature
information of ground objects: scattering features
(backscattering coefficient) and target features obtained by
polarization decomposition, which enlarges the difference of
different crops and ground objects. Therefore, it is more
conducive to distinguish different crops and reached higher
accuracy.
From Figure 2, we observed that in the pixel-based
classification results, MSI+MCI has the highest classification
accuracy, but there is still a lot of speckle noise in the
MSI+MCI classification map. The classification map of

5927

Authorized licensed use limited to: Carnegie Mellon Libraries. Downloaded on May 02,2023 at 11:36:35 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
crops after image segmentation is shown in Figure 2 (d). It
can be clearly found that the image in Figure 2 (d) has almost
no speckle noise. This is because the classification unit of
S[MSI+MCI] is ‘block’, and the pixels in the same segmented
block are homogeneous, thus they can be classified into the
same ground object type, which greatly reduces the
classification error caused by small patches. According to the
classification accuracy in Table 2, it can be found that the
classification accuracy of S[MSI+MCI] is significantly
improved compared with MSI+MCI.
5. CONCLUSION
In this study, similarity analysis of phenological features and
image segmentation technology were combined to classify
crops on multi-temporal RADARSAT-2 data. Conclusions
can be drawn from this study are: (1) the crop classification
based on similarity analysis of phenological features
performs good classification accuracy; (2) on the pixel scale,
the classification accuracy on the combination of backscatter
coefficient and polarization decomposition features is higher
than that of using one of these features alone; (3) image
segmentation can reduce the speckle noise to the greatest
extent and obtain the best classification effect.
6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work was supported by Sichuan Science and
Technology Program (Contract No. 2020YFG0048 and
2020YFS0058); the National Natural Science Foundation of
China (Contract No. 41601373); the Open Fund of State Key
Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science (Contract No.
OFSLRSS201712). The Radarsat-2 SAR images were
provided by Agriculture and Agri-food Canada (AAFC).
7. REFERENCE
[1] R. Benedetti and P. Rossini, "On the Use Of Ndvi Profiles
as a Tool for Agricultural Statistics: the Case-Study Of Wheat
Yield Estimate And Forecast In Emilia-Romagna," Remote
Sensing Of Environment, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 311-326, Sep
1993.
[2] X. Blaes, L. Vanhalle, and P. Defourny, "Efficiency of
crop identification based on optical and SAR image time
series," Remote Sensing Of Environment, vol. 96, no. 3-4, pp.
352-365, Jun 30 2005.
[3] K. Jia, Q. Z. Li, Y. C. Tian, B. F. Wu, F. F. Zhang, and J.
H. Meng, "Crop classification using multi-configuration SAR
data in the North China Plain," International Journal Of
Remote Sensing, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 170-183, 2012.
[4] F. Del Frate, G. Schiavon, D. Solimini, M. Borgeaud, D.
H. Hoekman, and M. A. M. Vissers, "Crop classification
using multiconfiguration C-band SAR data," Ieee
Transactions on Geoscience And Remote Sensing, vol. 41, no.
7, pp. 1611-1619, Jul 2003.
5928
Authorized licensed use limited to: Carnegie Mellon Libraries. Downloaded on May 02,2023 at 11:36:35 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
[5] Y. Shao et al., "Rice monitoring and production
estimation using multitemporal RADARSAT," Remote
Sensing Of Environment, vol. 76, no. 3, pp. 310-325, Jun
2001.
[6] D. H. Hoekman, M. A. M. Vissers, and T. N. Tran,
"Unsupervised Full-Polarimetric SAR Data Segmentation as
a Tool for Classification of Agricultural Areas," Ieee Journal
Of Selected Topics In Applied Earth Observations And
Remote Sensing, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 402-411, Jun 2011.
[7] J. S. Lee, M. R. Grunes, T. L. Ainsworth, L. J. Du, D. L.
Schuler, and S. R. Cloude, "Unsupervised classification using
polarimetric decomposition and the complex Wishart
classifier," Ieee Transactions on Geoscience And Remote
Sensing, vol. 37, no. 5, pp. 2249-2258, Sep 1999.
[8] J. Xu, Z. Li, B. S. Tian, L. Huang, Q. Chen, and S. T. Fu,
"Polarimetric analysis of multi-temporal RADARSAT-2
SAR images for wheat monitoring and mapping,"
International Journal Of Remote Sensing, vol. 35, no. 10, pp.
3840-3858, 2014.
[9] D. Wang, H. Lin, J. S. Chen, Y. Z. Zhang, and Q. W. Zeng,
"Application of multi-temporal ENVISAT ASAR data to
agricultural area mapping in the Pearl River Delta,"
International Journal Of Remote Sensing, vol. 31, no. 6, pp.
1555-1572, 2010.
[10] L. Wan, T. Zhang, and H. J. You, "Object-based
multiscale method for SAR image change detection," Journal
Of Applied Remote Sensing, vol. 12, no. 2, Apr 20 2018.
[11] X. Niu and Y. F. Ban, "Multi-temporal RADARSAT-2
polarimetric SAR data for urban land-cover classification
using an object-based support vector machine and a rule-
based approach," International Journal Of Remote Sensing,
vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 1-26, 2013.
[12] S. R. Cloude and E. Pottier, "A review of target
decomposition theorems in radar polarimetry," Ieee
Transactions on Geoscience And Remote Sensing, vol. 34, no.
2, pp. 498-518, Mar 1996.
[13] N. R. Pal and S. K. Pal, "A Review on Image
Segmentation Techniques," Pattern Recognition, vol. 26, no.
9, pp. 1277-1294, Sep 1993.
[14] C. H. Fosgate, H. Krim, W. W. Irving, W. C. Karl, and
A. S. Willsky, "Multiscale segmentation and anomaly
enhancement of SAR imagery," Ieee Transactions on Image
Processing, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 7-20, Jan 1997.