A Physically Interpretable Rice Field Extraction Model for PolSAR Imagery

• Published in: Remote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2023-02, Vol.15 (4), p.974
• Main Authors: Ge, Ji, Zhang, Hong, Xu, Lu, Sun, Chunling, Duan, Haoxuan, Guo, Zihuan, Wang, Chao
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Artificial satellites in remote sensing; Big Data; Classification; Crop production; Crops; Data processing; Decomposition; Deep learning; Feature extraction; interpretability; Long short-term memory; Machine learning; Neural networks; Phenology; Physical characteristics; Physical properties; Polarimetry; PolSAR; Remote sensing; Rice; rice field; Rice fields; Synthetic aperture radar
• ISSN: 2072-4292; 2072-4292
• DOI: 10.3390/rs15040974

Reliable and timely rice distribution information is of great value for real-time, quantitative, and localized control of rice production information. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has all-weather and all-day observation capability to monitor rice distribution in tropical and subtropical areas. To improve the physical interpretability and spatial interpretability of the deep learning model for SAR rice field extraction, a new SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) value-guided explanation model (SGEM) for polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) data was proposed. First, a rice sample set was produced based on field survey and optical data, and the physical characteristics were extracted using decomposition of polarimetric scattering. Then a SHAP-based Physical Feature Interpretable Module (SPFIM) combing the long short-term memory (LSTM) model and SHAP values was designed to analyze the importance of physical characteristics, a credible physical interpretation associated with rice phenology was provided, and the weight of physical interpretation was combined with the weight of original PolSAR data. Moreover, a SHAP-guided spatial interpretation network (SSEN) was constructed to internalize the spatial interpretation values into the network layer to optimize the spatial refinement of the extraction results. Shanwei City, Guangdong Province, China, was chosen as the study area. The experimental results showed that the physical explanation provided by the proposed method had a high correlation with the rice phenology, and spatial self-interpretation for finer extraction results. The overall accuracy of the rice mapping results was 95.73%, and the kappa coefficient reached 0.9143. The proposed method has a high interpretability and practical value compared with other methods.