Analysis on the effectiveness of multitemporal COSMO-SkyMed images for crop classification

This study presents a preliminary assessment of the potentialities of the COSMO-SkyMed® (CSK®) satellite constellation to accurately classify different crops. The experiment is focused on the main crops grown in the agricultural region of Marchfeld (Austria) namely carrot, corn, potato, soybean and sugar beet. A Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier was fed with temporally dense series of backscattering coefficients extracted from a stack of CSK® GTC products. In particular, twenty one CSK® dual polarization (11 HH, 10 VH) images were acquired over the site for the growing season (early April – mid October) in Stripmap Himage mode, with a nominal incidence angle at scene center of 40°. A comparison of the classifications obtained at the two different polarizations are reported and the result are analyzed in terms of the achieved accuracies. The SVM method was able to classify all five crop types with an overall accuracy of 81.6% (Kappa 0.77) at VH polarization and of 84.5% (Kappa 0.80) at HH polarization. Sugar beet, potato and carrot were accurately identified with OA never less than 83% at both polarizations, whereas corn and soybean showed remarkably differences in terms of producer’s and user’s accuracies, probably due to particular agricultural practices adopted for these two crop species. These first results show that the CSK® capability of acquiring temporally dense data sets can accurately identify several crop types.