Applying A Phenological Object-Based Image Analysis (Phenobia) for Agricultural Land Classification: A Study Case in the Brazilian Cerrado

Mapping agriculture with high accuracy is important to generate reliable information about crop production. Pixel-based methods still present problems with noise and usually require post-processing approaches to reach satisfactory results. Object-based Image Analysis (OBIA) enable the detection of homogeneous objects in remote sensing images based on spectral similarity. However, traditional OBIA does not consider the multi-temporal characteristics of land cover or land use, such as agriculture. The objective of this study is to evaluate a phenological object-based approach with dense Landsat image time series for mapping agriculture in different level of detail in the Brazilian Cerrado. We derived pixel-wise EVI fitted time series with 8-day temporal resolution and applied multi-resolution segmentation using all image bands to incorporate the influence of space and time. Then we generated phenological metrics and applied OBIA of agricultural lands in Brazil using a hierarchical classification scheme. The overall accuracies for each hierarchical level were around 90%, and the spatial consistency of the generated maps is promising.