Mapping of Agricultural Crops from Single High-Resolution Multispectral Images—Data-Driven Smoothing vs. Parcel-Based Smoothing

Remote Sensing

Asli Ozdarici-Ok³  Ali Ozgun Ok³  Konrad Schindler²  Chandra Giri¹ 

[1] Department of Geodesy and Photogrammetry, Nevsehir H.B.V. University, 50300 Nevsehir, Turkey; E-Mail;Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland; E-Mail:;Department of Geodesy and Photogrammetry, Nevsehir H.B.V. University, 50300 Nevsehir, Turkey; E-Mail:

关键词: multilabel graph cuts;    parcel-based smoothing;    classification;    agriculture;    satellite imagery;   

DOI  :  10.3390/rs70505611

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Mapping agricultural crops is an important application of remote sensing. However, in many cases it is based either on hyperspectral imagery or on multitemporal coverage, both of which are difficult to scale up to large-scale deployment at high spatial resolution. In the present paper, we evaluate the possibility of crop classification based on single images from very high-resolution (VHR) satellite sensors. The main objective of this work is to expose performance difference between state-of-the-art parcel-based smoothing and purely data-driven conditional random field (CRF) smoothing, which is yet unknown. To fulfill this objective, we perform extensive tests with four different classification methods (Support Vector Machines, Random Forest, Gaussian Mixtures, and Maximum Likelihood) to compute the pixel-wise data term; and we also test two different definitions of the pairwise smoothness term. We have performed a detailed evaluation on different multispectral VHR images (Ikonos, QuickBird, Kompsat-2). The main finding of this study is that pairwise CRF smoothing comes close to the state-of-the-art parcel-based method that requires parcel boundaries (average difference ≈ 2.5%). Our results indicate that a single multispectral (R, G, B, NIR) image is enough to reach satisfactory classification accuracy for six crop classes (corn, pasture, rice, sugar beet, wheat, and tomato) in Mediterranean climate. Overall, it appears that crop mapping using only one-shot VHR imagery taken at the right time may be a viable alternative, especially since high-resolution multitemporal or hyperspectral coverage as well as parcel boundaries are in practice often not available.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.