A image fusion and U-Net approach to improving crop planting structure multi-category classification in irrigated area

Abstract

Some subtle features of planting structures in irrigation areas could only be visible on high-resolution panchromatic spectral images. However, low spatial resolution multispectral image makes it hard to recognize them. It is challenging to accurately obtain crop planting structure when using traditional methods. This paper proposes an extraction method of crop planting structure based on image fusion and U-Net depth semantic segmentation network, which can automatically and accurately extract multi-category crop planting structure information. This method takes Landsat8 commercial multispectral satellite data set as an example, chooses RGB pseudo-color synthetic image which highlights vegetation characteristics, and uses HLS(Hue, Luminance, Saturation), NND(Nearest-Neighbor Diffusion) and G-S(Gram-Schmidt) methods to fuse panchromatic band to obtain 15m high-resolution fusion image to obtain training set and test set, six types of land features including cities and rivers were labeled by manual to obtain the verification set. The training and validation sets are cut and enhanced to train the U-Net semantic segmentation network. Taking the Xiaokaihe irrigation area in Binzhou City, Shandong Province, China, as an example, the planting structure was classified, and the overall accuracy was 87.7%, 91.2%, and 91.3%, respectively. The accuracy of crop planting structures (wheat, cotton, woodland) was 74.2%, 82.5%, 82.3%, and the Kappa coefficient was 0.832, 0.880, and 0.881, respectively. The results showed that the NND-UNet method was suitable for large-scale continuous crop types (wheat, cotton), and the GS-UNet method had a better classification effect in discrete areas of cash crops (Jujube and many kinds of fruit trees).