Accessing the temporal and spectral features in crop type mapping using multi-temporal Sentinel-2 imagery: A case study of Yi’an County, Heilongjiang province, China

Abstract Crop type mapping visualizes the spatial distribution patterns and proportions of the cultivated areas with different crop types, and is the basis for subsequent agricultural applications. Understanding the effectiveness of different temporal and spectral features in detailed crop classification can help users optimize temporal window selection and spectral feature space construction in crop type mapping applications. Therefore, in this study, we used time-series Sentinel-2 image data from Yi’an County, Heilongjiang province, China, to analyze the effectiveness of the temporal and spectral features used in three common machine learning classification methods: classification and regression tree (CART) decision tree, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and random forest (RF). For CART and SVM classifiers, the relative importance of the features was reflected by the order and frequency of attributes selected as the node and the square of the model weight. In RF, the change in prediction error as calculated by out of bag data is taken as the measure of feature importance. The standard deviation of the average value of all labeled pixels was used to evaluate the correctness of the unanimous conclusions drawn by these three methodologies. The quantitative evaluation results given by the confusion matrix show that random forest achieved the best overall accuracy, while support vector machine ranked second, and the decision tree algorithm yielded the least accurate classification results. From the perspective of feature importance, making full use of the discriminative information between different crops, and constructing a rational feature space, can help to improve classification accuracy significantly. In detail, the discriminative information between the different crop types is as follows: 1) images at the peak of the crop growth period are crucial in the classification of different crops; 2) the short-wave infrared bands are particularly suitable for fine crop classification; and 3) the red edge bands can effectively assist classification. Finally, our study achieved crop type mapping in the study area with an overall accuracy of 97.85% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.95.