Satellite-based system of area estimation for main agricultural crops of Ukraine

Abstract

The article studies one of the most important issues of agricultural production maintenance – development of a system of crops area estimation in Ukraine. The objective of this paper is to describe the similar system that uses high resolution satellite data and operational agrometeorological data from the network of the Hydrometeorological Centre of Ukraine as input information. The system is based on step-by-step solving of the following tasks: obtaining geoinformation data for individual agricultural crops; development of methods for multispectral satellite images classification; development of software applications to automate the process of these images classification with subsequent classification of crop areas. The research uses the following algorithms (or classifiers) to classify the agricultural land: SVM (support vector machine), RF ("random forest") and NN (neural networks). The choice of the most accurate of them formed the basis of the general method of classification. The values of spectral characteristics of red and infrared channels of a complete set of cloudless satellite images during the growing period were used as input data (features). As a result, in 2018 some test calculations were conducted to estimate the area of agricultural crops in Kyiv Region. The results of evaluation of accuracy of the satellite-based agricultural crops area estimation using the statistical data showed that the lowest accuracy is typical for winter wheat and corn. The accuracy of soybeans and spring barley classification is quite low for most of the tested fields. Sunflower and rapeseed crops showed the highest accuracy. In order to improve the accuracy of classification, it is necessary to introduce more classification features (in a temporary aspect) by processing more satellite images during the growing period, and to increase the number of test samples through systematic sampling of ground data across the regions in Ukraine. We suggest using the scheme of main agricultural crops area estimation satellite-based system by the Hydrometeorological Centre of Ukraine.

Keywords

• crops area estimation system, geoinformation data, classification, main agricultural crops.