Harvest monitoring of Kenyan tea plantations with X-band SAR

Tea is an important cash crop in Kenya, grown in a climatically restricted geographic area where climatic variability is starting to affect yield productivity levels. This paper assesses the feasibility of monitoring tea growth between, but also within fields, using X-band COSMO-SkyMed SAR images (five images at VV polarization and five images at HH polarization). We detect the harvested and nonharvested areas for each field, based on the loss of interferometric coherence between two images, with an accuracy of 52% at VV polarization and 74% at HH polarization. We then implement a normalization method to isolate the scattering component related to shoot growth and eliminate the effects of moisture and local incidence angle. After normalization, we analyze the difference in backscatter between harvested and nonharvested areas. At HH polarization, our backscatter normalization reveals a small decrease (∼0.1 dB) in HH backscatter after harvest. However, this decrease is too small for monitoring shoot growth. The decrease is not clear at VV polarization. This is attributed to the predominantly horizontal orientation of the harvested leaves.