Classification of orchard crop using sentinel-1A synthetic aperture radar data

Abstract

A study was conducted in Saharanpur District of Uttar Pradesh to asses the potential of Sentinel-1A SAR Data in orchard crop classification. The objective of the study was to evaluate three different classifiers that are maximum likelihood classifier, decision tree algorithm and random forest algorithm in Sentinel-1A SAR Data. An attempt is made to study Sentinel-1A SAR Data to classify orchard crop using this approach. Here the rule-based classifiers such as decision tree algorithm and random forest algorithm are compared with conventional maximum likelihood classifier. Statistical analysis of the classification show that the distribution of the crop, forest orchard, settlement and waterbody was 17.47 %, 0.47 %, 28.3 %, 28.3 % and 25.5 % respectively in all the classification algorithm but root mean square error for maximum likelihood classifier (1.278) is more than decision tree algorithm (1.196) and random forest algorithm (1.193). Out of three, a percentage correct prediction is highest in case of decision tree algorithm (73.4) than random forest algorithm (72.5) and least for maximum likelihood classifier (66.8) in December 2017. The accuracy for orchard class is 0.81 for maximum likelihood classifier, 0.80 for decision tree algorithm and 0.78 for random forest algorithm. Thus Sentinel-1A SAR Data was effectively utilized for the classification of orchard crops.