Classification of Crop Cultivation Areas Using Active Learning and Temporal Contextual Information

Abstract

This paper presents a classification method based on the combination of active learning with temporal contextual information extracted from past land-cover maps for the classification of crop cultivation areas. Iterative classification based on active learning is designed to extract reliable training data and cultivation rules from past land-cover maps are quantified as temporal contextual information to be used for not only assignment of training data but also relaxation of spectral ambiguity. To evaluate the applicability of the classification method proposed in this paper, a case study with MODIS time-series vegetation index data sets and past cropland data layers(CDLs) is carried out for the classification of corn and soybean in Illinois state, USA. Iterative classification based on active learning could reduce misclassification both between corn and soybean and between other crops and non crops. The combination of temporal contextual information also reduced the over-estimation results in major crops and led to the best classification accuracy. Thus, these case study results confirm that the proposed classification method can be effectively applied for crop cultivation areas where it is not easy to collect the sufficient number of reliable training data.