26 May 2023 SAR2NDVI: a pix2pix generative adversarial network for reconstructing field-level normalized difference vegetation index time series using Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar data
Arun Balaji Ramathilagam, Sudha Natarajan, Anil Kumar
Author Affiliations +
Abstract

The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is essential for monitoring urban green space, forest cover, and crop growth from sowing to harvesting. High-resolution images from Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 satellites are available nowadays to get field-level phenological information at short intervals. However, cloud cover is one of the biggest hindrances in vegetation monitoring using NDVI, resulting in data gaps. To address this issue, we propose an NDVI gap-filling methodology to generate cloud-free NDVI time series from Sentinel-1 SAR data using the pix2pix generative adversarial network (GAN) model. Pix2pix GANs with generators based on U-Net and ResNet were designed, and the performance of the models was compared for both the VV and VH polarizations. The generalization capability of the models was studied using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and NDVI image pairs with different vegetation, field sizes, and shapes. Experimental results show that the generated synthetic NDVI images can effectively substitute the cloudy images for gap-filling. Compared to ResNet, the U-Net generator has given the best results with PSNR = 29.447 dB, RMSE = 0.055, and Pearson correlation coefficient ρ = + 0.909 for VH polarization.

© 2023 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)
Arun Balaji Ramathilagam, Sudha Natarajan, and Anil Kumar "SAR2NDVI: a pix2pix generative adversarial network for reconstructing field-level normalized difference vegetation index time series using Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar data," Journal of Applied Remote Sensing 17(2), 024514 (26 May 2023). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JRS.17.024514
Received: 4 August 2022; Accepted: 9 May 2023; Published: 26 May 2023
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KEYWORDS
Gallium nitride

Synthetic aperture radar

Data modeling

Education and training

Vegetation

Histograms

Polarization

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