Performance Evaluation of UAVSAR and Simulated NISAR Data for Crop/Non-
crop Classification over Stoneville, MS
Abstract
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data are well-suited for change detection
over agricultural fields, owing to high spatiotemporal resolution and
sensitivity to soil and vegetation. The goal of this work is to evaluate
the science algorithm for the NASA ISRO SAR (NISAR) Cropland Area
product using UAVSAR and simulated NISAR data (129A). The NISAR
algorithm uses the coefficient of variation (CV) to perform
crop/non-crop classification at 100 m. We evaluate classifications using
three accuracy metrics (overall accuracy, J-statistic, Cohen’s Kappa)
and spatial resolutions (10, 30 and 100 m) for crop/non-crop delineating
CV thresholds (CVthr) ranging from 0 to 1 in 0.01 increments. All but
the 10 m 129A product exceeded the mission accuracy requirement of 80%.
The UAVSAR 10 m data performed best, achieving maximum overall accuracy,
J-statistic, and Kappa values of 85%, 0.62 and 0.60. The same metrics
for the 129A product respectively are: 77%, 0.40, 0.36 at 10 m; 81%,
0.55, 0.49 at 30 m; 80%, 0.58, 0.50 at 100 m. We found that using a
literature recommended CVthr value of 0.5 was suboptimal (65%) and that
optimal CVthr values monotonically decreased with decreasing spatial
resolution.