COMPARISON OF CROP CLASSIFICATION METHODS FOR THE SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE MANAGEMENT

Abstract

Accurate and reliable information regarding crop yields and soil conditions of agricultural fields are essential for the sustainable management of agricultural areas. The increasing necessity of the food due to the high population, global climate change and rapid urbanisation, the sustainable management of the agricultural resources is becoming more crucial for countries. Remote sensing technology offers a feasible solution for gathering the cost-effective, reliable and up-to-date information about crop monitoring by using high-resolution remote sensing data. Image classification is the one of most common method to obtain information from the remotely sensed images. Despite machine learning based classifiers such as Support Vector Machines (SVM) could provide high classification accuracy, the researchers have been still working to improve the classification accuracy. Recently, the utilisation of ensemble learning approaches in remote sensing classification is the research of interest for this purpose. In this study, we implemented six different supervised classification techniques and a classifier ensemble: Maximum Likelihood, Mahalanobis Distance, Minimum Distance, Spectral Angle Mapper, Parallelepiped, Support Vector Machines and Winner takes-all (WTA) classification which is an ensemble based classifier. In this study, we investigated the comparative performance of the classifiers within overall and corn-class category for the study area located in Aydin, Turkey. Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel was used here for the SVM classification. Results demonstrate that WTA classification outperformed other classification methods whilst the Parallelepiped obtained the lowest classification accuracy 13.24%. Moreover SVM gave the second highest overall classification accuracy of 89.90%.