Estimation of Crop Yield From Combined Optical and SAR Imagery Using Gaussian Kernel Regression

The synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometric coherence can complement optical data for the estimation of crop growth parameters, but it has not been yet investigated for predicting crop yield. Many studies have used machine learning methods, such as neural networks, random forest, and Gaussian process regression, to estimate crop yield from remotely sensed data. However, their performance depends on the amount of available ground truth data. This study proposed Gaussian kernel regression for rice yield estimation from optical and SAR imagery using a limited amount of ground truth data. The main objective was to investigate the synergetic use of Sentinel-2 vegetation indices and Sentinel-1 interferometric coherence data through Gaussian kernel regression for estimating rice grain yield. The prediction accuracy was assessed using in situ measured yield data collected in 2019 and 2020 over Xinghua county in Jiangsu Province, China. In all cases, Gaussian kernel regression outperformed the probabilistic Gaussian regression and Bayesian linear inference. With the independently used optical and SAR data, a better prediction accuracy was achieved with the optical red edge difference vegetation index (RDVI1) (r2 = 0.65, RMSE = 0.61 t/ha) than with the interferometric coherence (r2 = 0.52 and RMSE = 0.79 t/ha).The highest prediction accuracy can be achieved by combining RDVI1 with interferometric coherence at the heading stage (r2 = 0.81 and RMSE = 0.55 t/ha). The results suggest the value of synergy between satellite interferometric coherence and optical indices for crop yield mapping with Gaussian kernel regression.