Differentiation of Some Crops in Leingarten and Moessingen, Baden­ Wuerttemberg, Germany Using TerraSAR-X Data

Abstract

The aim of this research was to try and differentiate some of the important crop cultures in the Baden-Wuertternberg area by creating crop signatures from the backscatter values of the different crops from the different test sites. At the end it was also to establish whether the signatures of one crop (e.g. Maize) collected in one of the test site can be compared or transferred to another test site. This study was done using the TerraSAR-X data, with VV polarization, which was overlaid with crop fields' ground truth data that was collected from the fields. Images covering two test sites at Leingarten and Moessingen for the months of July and August were used. These test sites were located in different climatic regions that had different sowing times, crop development times and harvesting times as was elaborate in the "Klimaatlas maps". Only radiometric correction was carried out on the images. The speckle noise was not removed or minimized. The crops were classified according to the mean and standard deviation of their backscatter. The results obtained were then compared to results of other researches for checks and accuracies.