• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.5_1
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• pp.497-510
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• 2022

Agricultural reservoirs are essential structures for water supplies during dry period in the Korean peninsula, where water resources are temporally unequally distributed. For efficient water management, systematic and effective monitoring of medium-small reservoirs is required. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides a way for continuous monitoring of those, with its capability of all-weather observation. This study aims to evaluate the applicability of SAR in monitoring medium-small reservoirs using Sentinel-1 (10 m resolution) and Capella X-SAR (1 m resolution), at Chari (CR), Galjeon (GJ), Dwitgol (DG) reservoirs located in Ulsan, Korea. Water detected results applying Z fuzzy function-based threshold (Z-thresh) and Chan-vese (CV), an object detection-based segmentation algorithm, are quantitatively evaluated using UAV-detected water boundary (UWB). Accuracy metrics from Z-thresh were 0.87, 0.89, 0.77 (at CR, GJ, DG, respectively) using Sentinel-1 and 0.78, 0.72, 0.81 using Capella, and improvements were observed when CV was applied (Sentinel-1: 0.94, 0.89, 0.84, Capella: 0.92, 0.89, 0.93). Boundaries of the waterbody detected from Capella agreed relatively well with UWB; however, false- and un-detections occurred from speckle noises, due to its high resolution. When masked with optical sensor-based supplementary images, improvements up to 13% were observed. More effective water resource management is expected to be possible with continuous monitoring of available water quantity, when more accurate and precise SAR-based water detection technique is developed.