An Application of the “Traffic Lights” Idea to Crop Control in Integrated Administration Control System

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to discuss the idea of marking agricultural parcels in the control of direct payments to agriculture. The method of using remote sensing to monitor crops and mark them according to the idea of “traffic lights” is introduced. Classification into a given “traffic lights” color gives clear information about the status of the parcel. The image classification was done on Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 datasets by calculating the NDVI and SIGMA time series in the season from autumn 2016 to autumn 2017. Two approaches are presented: semi-automated and automated classifications. Semi-automated classification based on NDVI_index and SIGMA_index. Automated classification was performed on NDVI by Spectral Angle Mapper method and on SIGMA by Artificial Neural Network (Multilayer Perceptron, MLP method). The following overall accuracy was obtained for NDVI_SAM: 70.35%, while for SIGMA_CNN it was: 62.01%. User accuracy (UA) values were adopted for traffic lights analysis, in machine learning: positive predictive value (PPV). The UA/PPV for rapeseed were in NDVI_index method: 88.1% (6,986 plots), NDVI_SAM: 85.0% (199 plots), SIGMA_index: 61.3% (4,165 plots) and in SIGMA_CNN: 88.9% (2,035 plots). In order to present the idea of “traffic lights”, a website was prepared using data from the NDVI_index method, which is a trade-off between the number of plots and UA/PPV accuracy.