Low-parameter method for delineation of agricultural fields in satellite images based on multi-temporal MSAVI2 data

Abstract

This paper considers an issue of delineating agricultural fields in satellite images. In this task we follow a multi-temporal data approach. We show that on such data, good quality can be achieved using a simple low-parameter method. The method consists of a combination of a field detector and an edge detector. The field detection is based on an Otsu thresholding technique and for the edge detection we use a Canny detector. Facing a lack of available datasets and aiming to estimate the proposed algorithm, we prepared and published our dataset consisting of 18,859 expertly annotated fields using Sentinel-2 data. We implement one of the state-of-the-art deep-learning approaches and compare it with the proposed method on our dataset. The experiment shows the proposed simple multi-temporal algorithm to outperform the state-of-the-art instant data approach. This result confirms the importance of using multi-temporal data and for the first time demonstrates that the delineation problem can be solved at a lower cost without loss of quality. Our approach requires a significantly less amount of training data when compared with the NN-based one. The dataset of agricultural fields used in the work and the proposed algorithm implementation in Python are published in open access.