Sentinel 1A SAR Backscattering Signature of Maize and Cotton Crops

Abstract

Crop discrimination is a key issue for agricultural monitoring using remote sensing techniques. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data are advantageous for crop monitoring and classification because of their all-weather imaging capabilities. The multi-temporal Sentinel 1A SAR data was acquired from 08th August, 2015 to 23rd January, 2016 at 12 days interval covering the extent of Perambalur district of Tamil Nadu. Both the Vertical - Vertical (VV) and Vertical-Horizontal (VH) polarized data are compared. The ground truth data collection was performed for cotton and maize during the vegetative, flowering and harvesting stages. The temporal backscattering coefficient (σ0 ) for cotton and maize are extracted using the training datasets. The mean backscattering values for cotton during the entire cropping period ranges from -10.58 dB to -6.28 dB and -20.59 dB to -14.53 dB for VV and VH polarized data respectively, and for maize it ranges from -11.08 dB to -7.07 dB and -19.85 dB to -14.14 dB for VV and VH polarized data respectively.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.201721

Pages

54 - 57

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

Keywords