Frontiers in Plant Science (Jun 2022)

Mapping the Corn Residue-Covered Types Using Multi-Scale Feature Fusion and Supervised Learning Method by Chinese GF-2 PMS Image

  • Wancheng Tao,
  • Wancheng Tao,
  • Yi Dong,
  • Yi Dong,
  • Wei Su,
  • Wei Su,
  • Jiayu Li,
  • Jiayu Li,
  • Fu Xuan,
  • Fu Xuan,
  • Jianxi Huang,
  • Jianxi Huang,
  • Jianyu Yang,
  • Jianyu Yang,
  • Xuecao Li,
  • Xuecao Li,
  • Yelu Zeng,
  • Yelu Zeng,
  • Baoguo Li

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2022.901042
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 13

Abstract

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The management of crop residue covering is a vital part of conservation tillage, which protects black soil by reducing soil erosion and increasing soil organic carbon. Accurate and rapid classification of corn residue-covered types is significant for monitoring crop residue management. The remote sensing technology using high spatial resolution images is an effective means to classify the crop residue-covered areas quickly and objectively in the regional area. Unfortunately, the classification of crop residue-covered area is tricky because there is intra-object heterogeneity, as a two-edged sword of high resolution, and spectral confusion resulting from different straw mulching ways. Therefore, this study focuses on exploring the multi-scale feature fusion method and classification method to classify the corn residue-covered areas effectively and accurately using Chinese high-resolution GF-2 PMS images in the regional area. First, the multi-scale image features are built by compressing pixel domain details with the wavelet and principal component analysis (PCA), which has been verified to effectively alleviate intra-object heterogeneity of corn residue-covered areas on GF-2 PMS images. Second, the optimal image dataset (OID) is identified by comparing model accuracy based on the fusion of different features. Third, the 1D-CNN_CA method is proposed by combining one-dimensional convolutional neural networks (1D-CNN) and attention mechanisms, which are used to classify corn residue-covered areas based on the OID. Comparison of the naive Bayesian (NB), random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and 1D-CNN methods indicate that the residue-covered areas can be classified effectively using the 1D-CNN-CA method with the highest accuracy (Kappa: 96.92% and overall accuracy (OA): 97.26%). Finally, the most appropriate machine learning model and the connected domain calibration method are combined to improve the visualization, which are further used to classify the corn residue-covered areas into three covering types. In addition, the study showed the superiority of multi-scale image features by comparing the contribution of the different image features in the classification of corn residue-covered areas.

Keywords