A novel cotton mapping index combining Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 multispectral imagery

Abstract Cotton is an important cash crop in the world, as the main source of natural and renewable fiber for textiles. Accurate and timely monitoring of the cotton distribution is crucial for cotton cultivation management and international trade. However, most of the previous researches on cotton identification using remotely sensed images are highly dependent on training samples, and the collection of samples is time-consuming and expensive. To overcome this limitation, a new index, termed as Cotton Mapping Index (CMI), was developed in this study for automatic cotton mapping using time series of Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and Sentinel-2 Multispectral Instrument (MSI) satellite data. Four sites in the United States (U.S.) and four sites in China were selected to develop and assess the performance of the CMI. The spectral characteristics derived from Sentinel-2 and backscattering coefficients derived from Sentinel-1 for cotton and non-cotton crops during the cotton growth period were analyzed. Considering the phenology differences of crops in different regions, the features at an adaptive window were adopted to construct the CMI. The results showed that at the peak greenness period, the multiplication of red-edge 1 and red-edge 2 band for cotton samples were much larger than those for non-cotton samples, whereas the spectral angle at the red band as well as the absolute values of backscattering coefficients in vertical transmit and vertical receive (VV) polarization for cotton samples were much smaller than those for non-cotton samples. Based on these findings, the CMI was developed to identify cotton cultivated area within the cropland area. The overall accuracy of classification results for the sites in the U.S. was higher than 81.20%, and the mean relative error for the sites in Xinjiang of China was 26.69%. The CMI, which incorporated optical and radar features, had a better performance than the indices using optical features solely. The advantage of the CMI over supervised classifiers (i.e., k-nearest neighbors, support vector machine and random forest) is that no training samples are required. Moreover, the cotton distribution map can be obtained before the harvest using the CMI. These results indicated the potential of the CMI for cotton mapping. The applicability of CMI in other regions with different cropping systems and crop types needs to be further assessed in the future study.