FIRST RESULTS OF THE LEM BENCHMARK DATABASE FOR AGRICULTURAL APPLICATIONS

Abstract

Applying remote sensing technology to map and monitor agriculture and its impacts can greatly contribute for the proper development of this activity, promoting efficient food, fiber and energy production. For that, not only remote sensing images are needed, but also ground truth information, which is a key factor for the development and improvement of methodologies using remote sensing data. While a variety of images are current available, inclusive cost-free images, field reference data is scarcer. For agricultural applications, especially in tropical regions such as Brazil, where the agriculture is very dynamic and diverse (recent agricultural frontiers, crop rotations, multiple cropping systems, several management practices, etc.), and cultivated over a vast territory, this task is not trivial. One way of boosting the researches in agricultural remote sensing is to stimulate people to share their data, and to foster different groups to use the same dataset, so distinct methods can be properly compared. In this context, our group created the LEM Benchmark Database (a project funded by the ISPRS Scientific Initiative project - 2017) from the Luiz Eduardo Magalhães (LEM) municipality, Bahia State, Brazil. The database contains a set of pre-processed multitemporal satellite images (Landsat-8/OLI, Sentinel-2/MSI and SAR band-C Sentinel-1) and shapefiles of agricultural fields with their correspondent monthly land use classes, covering the period of one Brazilian crop year (2017–2018). In this paper we present the first results obtained with this database.