Land Cover Mapping Using Sentinel-1 Time-Series Data and Machine-Learning Classifiers in Agricultural Sub-Saharan Landscape
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper shows the efficiency of machine learning for improving land use/cover classification from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imagery as a tool that can be used in some sub-Saharan countries that experience frequent clouds. Indeed, we aimed to map the land use and land cover, especially in agricultural areas, using SAR C-band Sentinel-1 (S-1) time-series data over our study area, located in the Kaffrine region of Senegal. We assessed the performance and the processing time of three machine-learning classifiers applied on two inputs. In fact, we applied the random forest (RF), K-D tree K-nearest neighbor (KDtKNN), and maximum likelihood (MLL) classifiers using two separate inputs, namely a set of monthly S-1 time-series data acquired during 2020 and the principal components (PCs) of the time-series dataset. In addition, the RF and KDtKNN classifiers were processed using different tree numbers for RF (10, 15, 50, and 100) and different neighbor numbers for KDtKNN (5, 10, and 15). The retrieved land cover classes included water, shrubs and scrubs, trees, bare soil, built-up areas, and cropland. The RF classification using the S-1 time-series data gave the best performance in terms of accuracy (overall accuracy = 0.84, kappa = 0.73) with 50 trees. However, the processing time was relatively slower compared to KDtKNN, which also gave a good accuracy (overall accuracy = 0.82, kappa = 0.68). Our results were compared to the FROM-GLC, ESRI, and ESA world cover maps and showed significant improvements in some land use and land cover classes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".