Analysis of the potentiality of multi-temporal COSMO-SkyMed ® data for classifying summer crops

The exploitation of the high revisit time (8–16 days) by the COSMO-SkyMed® (CSK®) satellites is an important opportunity for agricultural mapping. This study aims at evaluating CSK® potentiality to classify different crop types, with CSK® multi-temporal images collected over the agricultural site of Marchfeld, in Austria. Two different time series of CSK® HIMAGE SAR scenes, at 3m resolution, 9 at HH and 9 at VH polarization were taken during the vegetation season (from April to October 2014). CSK® data were processed and analyzed to investigate crop signatures from CSK® backscattering coefficient of five crop types, namely carrot, corn, potato, soybean and sugarbeet. In situ field observations were conducted during the SAR data acquisition. CKS® data were overlaid with crop fields ground truth. A Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification method has been applied. The classification results yield very promising overall classification accuracies using the combination of HH and VH polarization.