Potential of fully polarimetric SAR data for crops biophysical parameters retrieval

Unique polarimetric information included in SAR data hasn´t received deserved attention, especially in the retrieval of crops biophysical parameters. This paper finds that two polarimetric parameters, that is polarimetric scattering entropy (H) and mean scattering angle (α), have great potential in crops biophysical parameters retrieval. Polarimetric features extracted by eigenvector-based and model-based polarimetric decomposition techniques were investigated to estimate biophysical parameters of winter wheat, such as leaf area index (LAI), biomass, vegetation water content and height etc. Moreover, MIMICS model was utilized to explain the reason why traditional methods based on power information fail when vegetation signal was not dominant. The fully polarimetric Radarsat-2 SAR images and simultaneous in-situ data in Beijing, 2011 were used. The result reveals that the correlation coefficient from the polarimetric parameters are as good as that from optical remote sensing.