An Object-Oriented Method for Extracting Single-Object Aquaculture Ponds from 10 m Resolution Sentinel-2 Images on Google Earth Engine

Abstract

Aquaculture plays a key role in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), while it is difficult to accurately extract single-object aquaculture ponds (SOAPs) from medium-resolution remote sensing images (Mr-RSIs). Due to the limited spatial resolutions of Mr-RSIs, most studies have aimed to obtain aquaculture areas rather than SOAPs. This study proposed an object-oriented method for extracting SOAPs. We developed an iterative algorithm combining grayscale morphology and edge detection to segment water bodies and proposed a segmentation degree detection approach to select and edit potential SOAPs. Then a classification decision tree combining aquaculture knowledge about morphological, spectral, and spatial characteristics of SOAPs was constructed for object filter. We selected a 707.26 km2 study region in Sri Lanka and realized our method on Google Earth Engine (GEE). A 25.11 km2 plot was chosen for verification, where 433 SOAPs were manually labeled from 0.5 m high-resolution RSIs. The results showed that our method could extract SOAPs with high accuracy. The relative error of total areas between extracted result and the labeled dataset was 1.13%. The MIoU of the proposed method was 0.6965, representing an improvement of between 0.1925 and 0.3268 over the comparative segmentation algorithms provided by GEE. The proposed method provides an available solution for extracting SOAPs over a large region and shows high spatiotemporal transferability and potential for identifying other objects.