Research on Estimation Crop Planting Area by Integrating the Optical and Microwave Remote Sensing Data

Considering the problem in monitoring agricultural condition in the semi-arid areas of Northwest of China, we propose a new method for estimation of crop planting area, using the single phase optical and microwave remote sensing data collaboratively, which have demonstrated their respective advantages in the extraction of surface features. In the model, the ASAR backscatter coefficient is normalized by the incident angle at first, then the classifier based on Bayesian network is developed, and the VV, VH polarization of ASAR and all the 7 TM bands are taken as the input of the classifier to get the class labels of each pixel of the images. Moreover the crop planting areas can be extracted by the classification results. At last, the model is validated for the necessities of normalization by the incident angle and integration of TM and ASAR respectively. It results that the estimation accuracy of crop planting area of corn and other crops garden are 98.47% and 78.25% respectively using the proposed method, with an improvement of estimation accuracy of about 3.28% and 4.18% relative to single TM classification. These illustrate that synthesis of optical and microwave remote sensing data is efficient and potential in estimation crop planting area.