Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Synergistic use of radar Sentinel-1 and optical Sentinel-2 imagery for crop mapping: a case study for Belgium

Version 1 : Received: 3 August 2018 / Approved: 3 August 2018 / Online: 3 August 2018 (12:01:50 CEST)

How to cite: Van Tricht, K.; Gobin, A.; Gilliams, S.; Piccard, I. Synergistic use of radar Sentinel-1 and optical Sentinel-2 imagery for crop mapping: a case study for Belgium. Preprints 2018, 2018080066. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201808.0066.v1 Van Tricht, K.; Gobin, A.; Gilliams, S.; Piccard, I. Synergistic use of radar Sentinel-1 and optical Sentinel-2 imagery for crop mapping: a case study for Belgium. Preprints 2018, 2018080066. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201808.0066.v1

Abstract

A timely inventory of agricultural areas and crop types is an essential requirement for ensuring global food security. Satellite remote sensing has proven to be an increasingly more reliable tool to identify crop types. With the Copernicus program and its Sentinel satellites, a growing source of satellite remote sensing data is publicly available at no charge. Here we use joint Sentinel-1 radar and Sentinel-2 optical imagery to create a crop map for Belgium. To ensure homogenous radar and optical input across the country, Sentinel-1 12-day backscatter composites were created after incidence angle normalization, and Sentinel-2 NDVI images were smoothed to yield dekadal cloud-free composites. An optimized random forest classifier predicted the 8 crop types with a maximum accuracy of 82% and a kappa coefficient of 0.77. We found that a combination of radar and optical imagery always outperformed a classification based on single-sensor inputs, and that classification performance increased throughout the season until July, when differences between crop types are largest. Furthermore we showed that the concept of classification confidence derived from the random forest classifier provided insight in the reliability of the predicted class for each pixel, clearly showing that parcel borders have a lower classification confidence. We concluded that the synergistic use of radar and optical data for crop classification led to richer information increasing classification accuracies compared to optical-only classification. Further work should focus on object-level classification and crop monitoring to exploit the rich potential of combined radar and optical observations.

Keywords

Crop classification; SAR; Optical; time series; Sentinel-1; Sentinel-2; random forest; machine learning

Subject

Environmental and Earth Sciences, Remote Sensing

Comments (0)

We encourage comments and feedback from a broad range of readers. See criteria for comments and our Diversity statement.

Leave a public comment
Send a private comment to the author(s)
* All users must log in before leaving a comment
Views 0
Downloads 0
Comments 0
Metrics 0


×
Alerts
Notify me about updates to this article or when a peer-reviewed version is published.
We use cookies on our website to ensure you get the best experience.
Read more about our cookies here.