Rice phenology estimation using SAR time-series data

The actual field survey data from the Rice Department of Thailand´s Ministry of Agriculture over a large area wastes a huge amount of resources. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a new approach to estimate rice phenology using SAR images derived from the RADARSAT-2 data. In this work, we divided the rice phenology into five stages, consisting of seedling, tillering, reproductive, ripening, and harvested stages and applied them to the hidden Markov model (HMM). Then, we estimated the backscattering coefficient time-series data to be used in the Viterbi algorithm. We were able to estimate the rice phenology, with 77.5 % accuracy when compared to the ground data.