Preliminary Results of an Investigation into the Potential Application of X-Band SLR Images for Crop-Type Inventory Purposes

Preliminary results are reported of an investigation into the potential application of SLR images (by which we mean both SAR and SLAR images) for crop-inventory purposes employing temporal dependency to obtain multi-dimensional observations. To evaluate this potential, SLR-image data are simulated, and subsequently classified. The results, which are restricted to VV-polarized X-band data, "taken" at a typical SLAR angle of 20° (grazing), indicate that an overall average error fraction of less than 20 percent can be reached for the region involved, with less than 5-percent error for some crops.