Mapping cultivable land from satellite imagery with clustering algorithms

Open data satellite imagery provides valuable data for the planning and decision-making processes related with environmental domains. Specifically, agriculture uses remote sensing in a wide range of services, ranging from monitoring the health of the crops to forecasting the spread of crop diseases. In particular, this paper focuses on a methodology for the automatic delimitation of cultivable land by means of machine learning algorithms and satellite data. The method uses a partition clustering algorithm called Partitioning Around Medoids and considers the quality of the clusters obtained for each satellite band in order to evaluate which one better identifies cultivable land. The proposed method was tested with vineyards using as input the spectral and thermal bands of the Landsat 8 satellite. The experimental results show the great potential of this method for cultivable land monitoring from remote-sensed multispectral imagery. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.