EXPLORING MACHINE LEARNING CLASSIFICATION ALGORITHMS FOR CROP CLASSIFICATION USING SENTINEL 2 DATA

Abstract. Crop Classification and recognition is a very important application of Remote Sensing. In the last few years, Machine learning classification techniques have been emerging for crop classification. Google Earth Engine (GEE) is a platform to explore the multiple satellite data with different advanced classification techniques without even downloading the satellite data. The main objective of this study is to explore the ability of different machine learning classification techniques like, Random Forest (RF), Classification And Regression Trees (CART) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) for crop classification. High Resolution optical data, Sentinel-2, MSI (10 m) was used for crop classification in the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) farm for the Rabi season 2016 for major crops. Around 100 crop fields (~400 Hectare) in IARI were analysed. Smart phone-based ground truth data were collected. The best cloud free image of Sentinel 2 MSI data (5 Feb 2016) was used for classification using automatic filtering by percentage cloud cover property using the GEE. Polygons as feature space was used as training data sets based on the ground truth data for crop classification using machine learning techniques. Post classification, accuracy assessment analysis was done through the generation of the confusion matrix (producer and user accuracy), kappa coefficient and F value. In this study it was found that using GEE through cloud platform, satellite data accessing, filtering and pre-processing of satellite data could be done very efficiently. In terms of overall classification accuracy and kappa coefficient, Random Forest (93.3%, 0.9178) and CART (73.4%, 0.6755) classifiers performed better than SVM (74.3%, 0.6867) classifier. For validation, Field Operation Service Unit (FOSU) division of IARI, data was used and encouraging results were obtained.