• Korean Journal of Soil Science and Fertilizer
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• v.44 no.5
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• pp.878-886
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• 2011

The soybean is one of the oldest cultivated crops in the world. Microwave remote sensing is an important tool because it can penetrate into cloud independent of weather and it can acquire day or night time data. Especially a ground-based polarimetric scatterometer has advantages of monitoring crop conditions continuously with full polarization and different frequencies. In this study, soybean growth parameters and soil moisture were estimated using polarimetric discrimination ratio (PDR) by radar scatterometer. A ground-based polarimetric scatterometer operating at multiple frequencies was used to continuously monitor the soybean growth condition and soil moisture change. It was set up to obtain data automatically every 10 minutes. The temporal trend of the PDR for all bands agreed with the soybean growth data such as fresh weight, Leaf Area Index, Vegetation Water Content, plant height; i.e., increased until about DOY 271 and decreased afterward. Soil moisture lowly related with PDR in all bands during whole growth stage. In contrast, PDR is relative correlated with soil moisture during below LAI 2. We also analyzed the relationship between the PDR of each band and growth data. It was found that L-band PDR is the most correlated with fresh weight (r=0.96), LAI (r=0.91), vegetation water content (r=0.94) and soil moisture (r=0.86). In addition, the relationship between C-, X-band PDR and growth data were moderately correlated ($r{\geq}0.83$) with the exception of the soil moisture. Based on the analysis of the relation between the PDR at L, C, X-band and soybean growth parameters, we predicted the growth parameters and soil moisture using L-band PDR. Overall good agreement has been observed between retrieved growth data and observed growth data. Results from this study show that PDR appear effective to estimate soybean growth parameters and soil moisture.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.89-101
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• 2007

This paper investigates the effects of the fusion of multifrequency (C and L bands) polarimetric SAR data in land-cover classification. NASA JPL AIRSAR C and L bands data were used to supervised classification in an agricultural area to simulate the integration of ALOS PALSAR and Radarsat-2 SAR data to be available. Several scattering features derived from target decomposition based on eigen value/vector analysis were used as input for a support vector machines classifier and then the posteriori probabilities for each frequency SAR data were integrated by applying a probabilistic ratio model as a decision level fusion methodology. From the case study results, L band data had the proper amount of penetration power and showed better classification accuracy improvement (about 22%) over C band data which did not have enough penetration. When all frequency data were fused for the classification, a significant improvement of about 10% in overall classification accuracy was achieved thanks to an increase of discrimination capability for each class, compared with the case of L band Shh data.