Mapping rice paddy in Henan Province using multi-temporal MODIS images

Rice paddy fields are characterized by an initial period of flooding and transplanting, which have obvious difference with other same time crop fields, such as corn, peanut, and cotton. To take this feature, MODIS 16-day composite EVI and LSWI data of 2010 were employed to retrieve the distribution of rice paddy in Henan Province of China. The raw EVI data was first smoothed by the TIMESAT software to get the seasonal vegetation development of the study area. Then, decision tree classifier was adopted for the classification based on the temporal difference of EVI and LSWI between rice paddy and other crop fields. The results showed that the rice mapping accuracy reached 83.1%, indicating the feasibility of MODIS time-series VI data and classification strategies adopted to extract rice paddy distribution.