Abstract
Accurate, year-by-year crop distribution information is a key element in agricultural production regulation and global change governance. However, due to the high sampling costs and insufficient use of historical samples, a supervised classifying method for sampling every year is unsustainable for mapping crop types over time. Therefore, this paper proposes a method for the generation and screening of new samples for 2018 based on historical crop samples, and then it builds a crop mapping model for that current season. Pixels with the same crop type in the historical year (2013–2017) were extracted as potential samples, and their spectral features and spatial information in the current year (2018) were used to generate new samples based on clustering screening. The research result shows that when the clustering number is different, the number and structure of new generated sample also changes. The sample structure generated in Luobei County was not balanced, with the ‘other crop’ representing less than 3.97%, but the structure of southwest Hulin City was more balanced. Based on the newly generated samples and the ground reference data of classified year, the classification models were constructed. The average classification accuracies of Luobei County in 2018 based on new generated samples and field samples were 69.35% and 77.59%, respectively, while those of southwest Hulin City were 80.44% and 82.94%, respectively. Combined with historical samples and the spectral information of the current year, this study proposes a method to generate new samples. It can overcome the problem of crop samples only being collected in the field due to the difficulty of visual interpretation, effectively improve the use of historical data, and also provide a new idea for sustainable crop mapping in many regions lacking seasonal field samples.
Highlights
Medium-high resolution crop mapping at regional scales can provide basic data for the more precise regulation of agricultural production and global change governance [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], and it is an important support for implementing sustainable agriculture [8]
The overall accuracy of 2015 and the F-Scores of maize and rice all reached their maximum value in Table 3, which indicates that feature number and time phase number have a certain influence on classification accuracy
In order to improve the utilization efficiency of historical samples, reduce the dependence of crop distribution mapping on year-by-year sampling, and produce crop distribution maps sustainably at a lower cost, a new method for generating and screening new crop samples based on historical data was proposed and used for current season crop classification in this paper
Summary
Medium-high resolution crop mapping at regional scales can provide basic data for the more precise regulation of agricultural production and global change governance [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], and it is an important support for implementing sustainable agriculture [8]. Crop samples are difficult to obtain by visual interpretation, so they can only be collected in the field. In existing crop classification studies, seasonal samples are often only used for crop classification in the current season, and they are rarely used for the season or even the few seasons, resulting in a low utilization rate of historical data [1,6,8]. The difficulty of sampling and the low utilization of historical data have led to the high cost of year-by-year mapping. After collecting data every year, it is necessary to carry out complex operations such as data preprocessing, and the final crop map is often obtained after the harvest, which leads to a lag of crop mapping and its guiding role for farming being greatly weakened. The question of how to sustainably carry out crop classification based on historical data has become a research hotspot
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