Parcel-Based Crop Classification in Ukraine Using Landsat-8 Data and Sentinel-1A Data

For many applied problems in agricultural monitoring and food security, it is important to provide reliable crop classification maps. Satellite imagery is extremely valuable source of data to provide crop maps in a timely way at moderate and high spatial resolution. Information on parcel boundaries that takes into account the spatial context may improve the quality of maps compared to pixel-based classification approaches. In general, parcels may contain several plots with different crops and such situations should be taken into account when using parcel boundaries. In this paper, we aim to compare pixel-based and parcel-based approaches to crop classification from multitemporal optical (Landsat-8) and synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) Sentinel-1 imagery. For this, we propose a parcel-based approach that involves a pixel-based classification map and specifically designed rules to account for several plots within parcel. The study is carried out for the Joint Experiment of Crop Assessment and Monitoring test site in Ukraine covering the Kyiv oblast (North of Ukraine) in 2013-2015, and the Odessa oblast (South of Ukraine) in 2014-2015. We found that pixel-based overall classification accuracy can be increased from 85.32% to 89.40% when using parcel boundaries. Among tested parcel-based approaches, the one that relied on pixel-based classification map and a procedure to select multiple plots within the parcel yielded the best performance.