Mapping Rice Paddies in Complex Landscapes with Convolutional Neural Networks and Phenological Metrics

Rice mapping with remote sensing imagery provides an alternative means for estimating crop-yield and performing land management due to the large geographical coverage and low cost of remotely sensed data. Rice mapping in Southern China, however, is very difficult as rice paddies are patchy and fragmented, reflecting the undulating and varied topography. In addition, abandoned lands widely exist in Southern China due to rapid urbanization. Abandoned lands are easily confused with paddy fields, thereby degrading the classification accuracy of rice paddies in such complex landscape regions. To address this problem, the present study proposes an innovative method for rice mapping through combining a convolutional neural network (CNN) model and a decision tree (DT) method with phenological metrics. First, a pre-trained LeNet-5 Model using the UC Merced Dataset was developed to classify the cropland class from other land cover types, i.e. built-up, rivers, forests. Then, paddy rice field was separated from abandoned land in the cropland class using a DT model with phenological metrics derived from the time-series data of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The accuracy of the proposed classification methods was compared with three other classification techniques, namely, back propagation neural network (BPNN), original CNN, pre-trained CNN applied to HJ-1 A/B charge-coupled device (CCD) images of Zhuzhou City, Hunan Province, China. Results suggest that the proposed method achieved an overall accuracy of 93.56%, much higher than those of other methods. This indicates that the proposed method can efficiently accommodate the challenges of rice mapping in regions with complex landscapes.