Mapping crop cover using multi-temporal Landsat 8 OLI imagery

ABSTRACT

Crop classification maps are useful for estimating amounts of crops harvested, which could help address challenges in food security. Remote-sensing techniques are useful tools for generating crop maps. Optical remote sensing is one of the most attractive options because it offers vegetation indices (VIs) with frequent revisits and has adequate spatial and spectral resolution and some data has been distributed free of charge. However, sufficient consideration has not been given to the potential of VIs calculated from Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) data. This article describes the use of Landsat 8 OLI data for the classification of crops in Hokkaido, Japan. In addition to reflectance, VIs calculated from simple formulas that consisted of combinations of two or more reflectance wavebands were evaluated, as well as the six components of the Kauth–Thomas transform. The VIs based on shortwave infrared bands (bands 6 or 7) improved classification accuracy, and using a combination of all derived data from Landsat 8 OLI data resulted in an overall accuracy of 94.5% (allocation disagreement = 4.492 and quantity disagreement = 1.017).

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Tokachi Nosai for providing the field data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI [grant number 15H06249].