SARscape SAR Processing and RIICE Rice Monitoring

sarmap is a Swiss company founded in 1998 in Caslano that builds Earth observation software and services, with a focus on synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Radar sees through clouds and works at night, which matters in tropical regions where optical satellites often miss key dates for crops, floods or ground movement.

SARscape is a modular SAR processing suite running on the ENVI platform and distributed by NV5 Geospatial. Modules cover intensity and coherence processing, interferometry (InSAR and DInSAR) for elevation and displacement maps, polarimetry, and interferometric stacking with SBAS and persistent scatterers, plus cluster processing for large areas. sarmap also co-runs RIICE with IRRI, Swiss Re and the Swiss Development Cooperation, a SAR-based rice monitoring service covering about 12 million hectares in the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, India and Thailand.

• Basic module: multi-looking, co-registration, speckle filtering, geocoding, calibration and mosaicking.
• Interferometry: InSAR and DInSAR for DEMs, coherence and displacement maps.
• Interferometric Stacking: SBAS, PS, E-SBAS, E-PS and continuous tomography for subsidence time series.
• SAR Polarimetry: polarimetric and PolInSAR processing.
• Cluster processing: distributes large stacking pipelines across nodes.
• RIICE products: rice area maps, growth stages, yield forecasts and flood or drought damage maps.

• Agricultural insurers and agencies in the Mekong Delta estimating rice area, yield and flood losses each season.
• Survey and engineering firms measuring land subsidence in Ho Chi Minh City and along infrastructure corridors with InSAR.
• Universities and remote sensing centres building SAR processing capacity.

• Cloud-independent monitoring of crops, floods and land subsidence in tropical climates.
• RIICE reports about 90% accuracy for rice area and yield information and transfers know-how so national partners can run the service.
• One toolset from basic SAR calibration to advanced InSAR time series, including support for new missions such as NISAR, BIOMASS and PALSAR-3.
• Cluster module scales displacement processing to large regions.

New radar missions such as NISAR and BIOMASS are expanding free and commercial SAR data. In Southeast Asia, governments and insurers need reliable rice statistics and damage assessment under frequent cloud cover, and land subsidence in deltas and cities is a growing concern; RIICE agreements already support rice insurance schemes in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Founded in 1998; headquarters at Via Stazione 52, Caslano, Switzerland. SARscape is distributed by NV5 Geospatial. RIICE started in 2011, co-financed by the Swiss Development Cooperation with IRRI and Swiss Re; the Philippines' PRiSM rice monitoring system is based on RIICE technology. Also offers Opticalscape software and capacity building.