Investigating operational country-level crop monitoring with Sentinel~1 and~2 imagery

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, we propose an operational solution for the yearly classification of crop parcels at national scale (namely France) for Land Parcel Identification System updating, under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) umbrella. Our pipeline is based on the open-source framework and fed with both time series of Sentinel-1 radar and Sentinel-2 optical images, with complementary contributions. Three conceivable scenarios are investigated with two sets of nomenclatures (17 and 43 classes): early, on-line, and late classifications. Experiments performed on 2017 show very satisfactory results (82–97%), locally almost on-par with state-of-the-art deep-based methods. We can conclude our framework offers a strong basis for country-scale operational deployment for 2020+ CAP.