Fusion of Multi-Temporal PAZ and Sentinel-1 Data for Crop Classification

The accurate identification of crops is essential to help environmental sustainability and support agricultural policies. This study presents the use of a Spanish radar mission, PAZ, to classify agricultural areas with a very high spatial resolution. PAZ was recently launched, and it operates at X band, joining the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) constellation along with TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X satellites. Owing to its novelty and its ability to classify crop areas (both taking individually its time series and blending with the Sentinel-1 series), it has been tested in an agricultural area of the central-western part of Spain during 2020. The random forest algorithm was selected to classify the time series under five alternatives of standalone/fused data. The map accuracy resulting from the PAZ series standalone was acceptable, but it highlighted the need for a denser time-series of data. The overall accuracy provided by eight PAZ images or by eight Sentinel-1 images was below 60%. The fusion of both sets of eight images improved the overall accuracy by more than 10%. In addition, the exploitation of the whole Sentinel-1 series, with many more observations (up to 40 in the same temporal window) improved the results, reaching an overall accuracy around 76%. This overall performance was similar to that obtained by the joint use of all the available images of the two frequency bands (C and X).