SAR Time-Series for Soybean Pod Formation Detection

Abstract

Sentinel-1 SAR data provide great opportunity for agricultural monitoring due to its high spatial coverage, high spatial resolution and high temporal resolution. Pod formation stage is the critical stage which affects the yield, currently there is insufficient research in phenological stage identification for soybean as it is a rainfed crop so optical data is insufficient for its monitoring, therefore Synthetic Aperture Radar is best alternative over optical data. SAR based vegetation index known as Dual polarized Radar vegetation index (DpRVI) works for crop phenology monitoring. There is a trend observed for soybean growth stage, initial it increases after sowing and formed a dip afterward with mean DpRVI as 0.35 and standard deviation as 0.08. This study finds a pattern of first derivative of phenoloical profile and identifies that the inflection point represent the pod formation stage for soybean growth. © 2024 IEEE.