Field Campaign Bardhhaman | Experimental Plans

Agricultural resources are important dynamic natural resources and a major contributor to Indian economic growth. Accurate crop condition assessment, acreage estimation and on time yield assessment helps in providing a crucial information about the crops and leads to proper management of agricultural resources. In long term perspective, it is related to national and global food security. With large area synoptic coverage and timely measurements, remote sensing technology is able to fulfill all these requirements for crop related assessments. Remote sensing satellites are regularly used for crop acreage and production estimation, crop health monitoring. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) capability to penetrate clouds and acquire data in all-weather condition makes it useful for monitoring and inventory purpose in Indian context. SAR signal can penetrate deeper into vegetation and give information about structure of leaves, stems and the background soil moisture content. The variation in SAR signal response due to crop structural properties and canopy moisture content from sowing to senescence stage is suitable for the utilization of microwave remote sensing for the crop type identification, growth monitoring and yield modeling.

Major focus: Crop characterization using fully polarimetric Radarsat-2 SAR data

Proposed Objectives:

  • Crop classification and monitoring using multi-temporal polarimetric SAR data
  • Phenology estimation of geometrically different crops using polarimetric information content from quad-pol data
  • Crop bio-physical parameter retrieval using multi-target inversion scheme from PolSAR data

Proposed Method:

The proposed work involves acquisition of satellite imageries and in-synchronous crop related field measurements. As per the objectives of the project, analysis will be performed using fully polarimetric descriptors and polarimetric target decompositions. In addition we will try to use optical sensor data products for support.

Schedule: