COMPARISON OF LANDSAT-8 AND SENTINEL-2 DATA FOR CLASSIFICATION OF RABI CROPS OVER KARNATAKA, INDIA

Abstract. Classification of crops is very important to study different growth stages and forecast yield. Remote sensing data plays a significant role in crop identification and condition assessment over a large spatial scale. Importance of Normalized Difference Indices (NDIs) along with surface reflectances of remotely sensed spectral bands have been evaluated for classification of eight types of Rabi crops utilizing the Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 datasets and performances of both the satellites are compared. Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2A images are acquired for the location of crops and seven and nine spectral bands are utilized respectively for the classification. Experiments are carried out considering the different combinations of surface reflectances of spectral bands and optimal NDIs as features in support vector machine classifier. Optimal NDIs are selected from the set of ⁷C₂ and ⁹C₂ NDIs of Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2A datasets respectively using the partial informational correlation measure, a nonparametric feature selection approach. Few important vegetation indices (e.g. enhanced vegetation index) are also experimented in combination with the surface reflectances and NDIs to perform the crop classification. It has been observed that combination of surface reflectances and optimal NDIs can classify the crops more efficiently. The average overall accuracy of 80.96% and 88.16% are achieved using the Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2A datasets respectively. It has been observed that all the crop classes except Paddy and Cotton achieve producer accuracy and user accuracy of more than 75% and 85% respectively. This technique can be implemented for crop identification with adequate accessibility of crop information.