ERS-1 data for agricultural administration

The project PASTA (Pilot Project for the Application of SAR-Techniques to Agricultural Statistics and Inspection of Land Use in Baden-Würtemberg, Germany) is a practical application of ERS-1 data to be used for agricultural administration. The aim is to provide reliable data for the agricultural statistics on a year by year basis for the main types of crop.

More than 560 test fields of the Ostalbkreis area/Germany were analysed, and the figure shows the ground-truth properties of the area which has been used for this test.

Only fields with a size greater than 10 pixels have been taken into account for the following 6 crop types: winter wheat, winter barley. summer barley, oats, rape and corn.

This figure shows a multitemporal overlay of three speckle filtered (gamma map filter) ERS-1.SAR.GTC scenes of Ostalbkreis test area, taken on 20/5., 26/6., 29/7.1993.
Three SPOT XS scenes were also analysed from the same area. And, after integration of the data into a GIS, classification was performed using training samples provided by the GIS. In order to test a realistic case 1 SPOT scene acquired on 24.5.93 (displayed in red) and 2 ERS-1.SAR.GTC acquired on 20.5 (green) and 26.6.93 (blue) were processed, and the figure shows the multitemporal SAR-optical composition.

The figure shows the result of the maximum-likelihood classification process for the Ostalbkreis area.

The comparison with the ground truth information (left) shows that quite a lot of fields have been classified properly, and it has been shown that the classification accuracy using only the SPOT scene was improved by 8% using also SAR data.

(Courtesy of Ph.Hartl S.Güth, H-G.Klaedtke, G.Palubinskas, M.Reich, K.Wörz
Institute of Navigation, Univ.Stuttgart/Germany)

Keywords: ESA European Space Agency - Agence spatiale europeenne, observation de la terre, earth observation, satellite remote sensing, teledetection, geophysique, altimetrie, radar, chimique atmospherique, geophysics, altimetry, radar, atmospheric chemistry