Title
Land Cover and Crop Type Classification along the Season Based on Biophysical Variables Retrieved from Multi-Sensor High-Resolution Time Series
Abstract
With the ever-increasing number of satellites and the availability of data free of charge, the integration of multi-sensor images in coherent time series offers new opportunities for land cover and crop type classification. This article investigates the potential of structural biophysical variables as common parameters to consistently combine multi-sensor time series and to exploit them for land/crop cover classification. Artificial neural networks were trained based on a radiative transfer model in order to retrieve high resolution LAI, FAPAR and FCOVER from Landsat-8 and SPOT-4. The correlation coefficients between field measurements and the retrieved biophysical variables were 0.83, 0.85 and 0.79 for LAI, FAPAR and FCOVER, respectively. The retrieved biophysical variables' time series displayed consistent average temporal trajectories, even though the class variability and signal-to-noise ratio increased compared to NDVI. Six random forest classifiers were trained and applied along the season with different inputs: spectral bands, NDVI, as well as FAPAR, LAI and FCOVER, separately and jointly. Classifications with structural biophysical variables reached end-of-season overall accuracies ranging from 73%-76% when used alone and 77% when used jointly. This corresponds to 90% and 95% of the accuracy level achieved with the spectral bands and NDVI. FCOVER appears to be the most promising biophysical variable for classification. When assuming that the cropland extent is known, crop type classification reaches 89% with spectral information, 87% with the NDVI and 81%-84% with biophysical variables.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.3390/rs70810400
REMOTE SENSING
Keywords
Field
DocType
classification
Satellite,Remote sensing,Atmospheric radiative transfer codes,Normalized Difference Vegetation Index,Artificial neural network,Spectral bands,Geology,Random forest,Land cover
Journal
Volume
Issue
Citations 
7
8
8
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.56
20
10
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
francois waldner1493.52
mariejulie lambert280.56
Wenjuan Li327136.26
M. Weiss420530.48
Valérie Demarez5153.14
david morin6161.14
Claire Marais-Sicre7374.70
Olivier Hagolle817724.29
Frédéric Baret924543.65
Pierre Defourny1016724.70