MULTI-TEMPORAL FEATURE EXTRACTION FOR PRECISE MAIZE AREA MAPPING USING TIME-SERIES SENTINEL 1A SAR DATA

Abstract. A research study was conducted to map maize area in Ariyalur and Perambalur districts of Tamil Nadu, India using multi-temporal features extracted from time-series Sentinel 1A SAR data. Multi-temporal Sentinel 1A GRD data at VV and VH polarizations and SLC products were acquired for the study area at 12 days interval and processed using MAPscape-RICE software. Multi-temporal Sentinel 1A data was used to identify the backscattering dB curve of maize crop. Analysis of temporal signatures of the crop showed minimum values at sowing period and maximum during the tasseling stage, which decreased during maturity stage of the crop. The maximum increase in the signature was observed during seedling to vegetative growth period. The signature derived from dB values for maize crop expressed a significant temporal behavior with the range of −21.26 to −13.18 in VH polarization and −14.05 to −6.54 in VV polarization. Considering the accuracy of SAR data to phenological variations of maize growing period, Multi-Temporal Features were extracted from multi-temporal dB images of VV and VH polarization and coherence images. Multi-Temporal Features viz., max, min, mean, max date, min date and span ratio were extracted from VV and VH polarizations of Sentinel 1A GRD and SLC data to classify maize pixels in the study area using parameterized classification approach. The overall classification accuracy was 91 percent with the kappa score of 0.82.