Area Estimation of Mango and Coconut Crops using Machine Learning in Hesaraghatta Hobli of Bengaluru Urban District, Karnataka

Timely and accurate estimation of acreage and production of horticulture crops is necessary for deciding how much, where and when to export these commodities in the national and global markets. Remote sensing has been one of the methods adopted, in addition to conventional sampling methods, for improving the estimates. Parametric image classification algorithms have been used by many researchers for identification and area estimation of horticulture crops. But these algorithms result in several unclassified pixels leading to over/underestimates. This study has been undertaken to estimate the area of two horticulture crops (i.e., mango and coconut) of Hesaraghatta hobli of Bengaluru urban district using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) on Google Colaband Random Forest (RF) algorithms on Google Earth Engine (GEE). Remotely sensed data acquired by the Multi-Spectral Instrument (MSI) onboard Sentiel-2A satellite was used. Spectral signatures of horticulture crops and other associated cover types have been generated to identify the cover types and for selecting appropriate band combinations. Two different band combinations were used for area estimation of selected horticulture crops: i) Near-InfraRed (NIR), Red, and Green all three having a spatial resolution of 10 m, ii) Red edge-3, Short-Wave InfraRed1 (SWIR1) and Short-Wave InfraRed2 (SWIR2) having 20 m spatial resolution. Area estimates of horticulture crops and associated cover types were validated with respect to ground truth and statistical reports from Karnataka State Directorate of Horticulture (KSDH). It was found that the CNN model performed better than RF using NIR, Red, and Green band combination with an overall accuracy of 84%, but it failed to give similar accuracies with Red edge 3, SWIR1, and SWIR2 band combination. We attempted transfer learning using the trained CNN model at two different study areas far away from the study area and found encouraging results.