Mapping stand age of rubber plantation using ALOS-2 polarimetric SAR data

Abstract

This paper presents an evaluation on strategies for rubber plantation mapping employing SAR data coupled with Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Linear backscatter coefficients achieved saturation point at about 10 years, making this form of polarimetric data being robust only for young to mature stands. This research found that the performance of both algorithms was comparable. The addition of texture features gave substantial impact to the overall accuracy. As indicated by the analysis of variable importance, only some texture features have contributed to higher overall accuracy. Classification using a subset of texture features pointed out that accuracy could be improved using dual polarimetric data, while trivial enhancement was seen in combined HH, HV and VV backscatter intensities. The research showed that classification accuracy could be further augmented by setting proper classification parameters. Nonetheless, it is argued that the level of improvement would greatly depend on selecting a proper dataset fed into classifier, rather than tuning classifier parameters.