Paddy Field Mapping Using Topographic and Scattering Features of PolSAR Data

Irrigated rice fields in Asia have a distinct topography and scattering mechanisms. Because of these factors, many studies using radar backscattering information have been conducted to improve the mapping accuracy; however, relatively little attention has been paid to the topographic features (TF) provided by polarimetric synthetic aperture Radar (PolSAR) data. To address this issue, this letter presents a simple rice field mapping method in its late-vegetative stage using both the TF and scattering features (SF) of the PolSAR data. First, two TF, the polarization orientation angle and the dominant beta angle from the PolSAR data, were analyzed with respect to the slope from a digital elevation model. The results indicated that this feature pair had a moderately high correlation. As a result, flat areas were easily extracted using these two TF. Second, to use the SF of rice in the late-vegetative stage, the copolarized ratio and the copolarized phase difference were simply combined to map only paddy fields, of which scattering was dominated by the double-bounce scattering caused by the ground and canopy reflection. The results using C-band Radarsat-2 data were compared with a support vector machine classifier and demonstrated that the proposed mapping method provided an overall better performance. The proposed method might also be efficiently applied, with modification, for the aforementioned purpose in inaccessible areas.