Guided Filtered Sparse Auto-Encoder for Accurate Crop Mapping from Multitemporal and Multispectral Imagery

Accurate crop mapping is a fundamental requirement in various agricultural applications, such as inventory, yield modeling, and resource management. However, it is challenging due to crop fields' high spectral, spatial, and temporal variabilities. New technology in space-borne Earth observation systems has provided high spatial and temporal resolution image data as a valuable source of information, which can produce accurate crop maps through efficient analytical approaches. Spatial information has high importance in accurate crop mapping; a Window-based strategy is a common way to extract spatial information by considering neighbourhood information. However, crop field boundaries implicitly exist in image data and can be more helpful in identifying different crop types. This study proposes Guided Filtered Sparse Auto-Encoder (GFSAE) as a deep learning framework guided implicitly with field boundary information to produce accurate crop maps. The proposed GFSAE was evaluated over two time-series datasets of high-resolution PlanetScope (3 m) and RapidEye (5 m) imagery, and the results were compared against the usual Sparse Auto Encoder (SAE). The results show impressive improvements in terms of all performance metrics for both datasets (namely 3.69% in Overal Accuracy, 0.04 in Kappa, and 4.15% in F-score for the PlanetScope dataset, and 3.71% in OA, 0.05 in K, and 1.61% in F-score for RapidEye dataset). Comparing accuracy metrics in field boundary areas has also proved the superiority of GFSAE over the original classifier in classifying these areas. It is also appropriate to be used in field boundary delineation applications.