A machine learning approach for accurate crop type mapping using combined SAR and optical time series data

A country's food needs mainly depend upon its agriculture resources and require reliable information related to crop health, distribution, and acreage estimation to manage and monitor resources to implement a sustainable agricultural system. Different methodologies have been used to collect this information. However, the availability of earth resource satellite data with improved spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions, such as the European Space Agency's (ESA) Copernicus program satellites Sentinel-1 (S1) and Sentinel-2 (S2), are creating more practicability to generate crop type maps. S1 and S2, both operating in a constellation of twin satellites, carry a C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and Multispectral Instrument (MSI). Vertical transmit and horizontal receive (VH), and vertical transmit and vertical receive (VV) channels of S1 were used to exploit the temporal backscatter of crops present in the study area. In this research, a machine learning random forest classification algorithm is used for accurate crop type mapping through the combination of SAR (S1) and optical (S2) time-series data. Random forest classifier has produced considerable improved accuracies of crop type mapping in previous studies as it uses ensemble decision trees trained on sample data which permit the vote in favor of the most popular land use/ land cover class. The key objectives of this study are to investigate the classification accuracies for different data combinations. Three plots of data are tested (i) S1 (ii) S2 (iii) S1 & S2. A combination of SAR and optical data turn out with the best overall accuracy of 97% and a kappa coefficient of 0.97. Space-borne SAR and optical data add a new aspect of crop type mapping, which increases the classification accuracy by including valuable parameters and beating the drawbacks of each other. By comparing the results, it can be concluded that combining all-weather accessible SAR and spectrally rich optical data accomplished more accurate outcomes. It would be an imperative advance for the future endeavor to estimate crop biomass and biophysical parameters. (c) 2021 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.