Time series SAR polarimetric analysis of rice crop based on four-component scattering decomposition

Terrain and land use classification is one of the most important applications of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar [1]. Various methods have been proposed to classify terrain based on polarimetric statistical characteristics. A four-component scattering decomposition [2] scheme based on the coherency matrix [3] has been proposed to supplement the common three-component decomposition by Freeman and Durden[4] by adding a helix components that represent scattering contribution from complex urban environment. This paper applies the four-component decomposition to analyze the polarimetric response of rice crop from time series of polarimetric SAR data acquired from RADARSAT-2. To trace the growth stage, change detection was performed over the four components, with surface scattering, volume scattering, double bounce, and helix scattering as feature vector, using CFAR detector.