Efficiency and accuracy of per-field classification for operational crop mapping

A crop map of The Netherlands was created using a methodology that integrates multi-temporal and multi-sensor satellite imagery, statistical data on crop area and parcel boundaries from a 1 : 10 000 digital topographic map. In the first phase a crop field database was created by extracting static parcel boundaries from the digital topographic map and by adding dynamic crop boundaries using on-screen digitizing. In the next phase the crop type was determined from the spectral and phenological properties of each field. The resulting crop map has an accuracy larger than 80% for most individual crops and an overall accuracy of 90%. By comparing cost and man-hours it was demonstrated that per-field classification is more efficient than per-pixel classification and decreased the effort for classification from 1500 to 500 man-hours, but the effort for creating the crop field database was estimated at 2300 man-hours. The use of image segmentation techniques for deriving the crop field database was discussed. It was concluded that image segmentation cannot replace the use of a large-scale topographic map but, in the future, image segmentation may be used to map the dynamic crop boundaries within the topographic parcels.