The Canadian Cropland Dataset: A New Land Cover Dataset for Multitemporal Deep Learning Classification in Agriculture

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive, high-resolution, multitemporal Canadian cropland dataset with detailed annotations, enabling improved deep learning models for land cover classification and agricultural monitoring.

Contribution

It provides a new large-scale, high-quality, annotated dataset for multitemporal crop classification, along with baseline models and code for remote sensing analysis.

Findings

Dataset contains 78,536 images across 10 crop classes.

Baseline models achieve promising classification accuracy.

The dataset supports development of robust agricultural monitoring tools.

Abstract

Monitoring land cover using remote sensing is vital for studying environmental changes and ensuring global food security through crop yield forecasting. Specifically, multitemporal remote sensing imagery provides relevant information about the dynamics of a scene, which has proven to lead to better land cover classification results. Nevertheless, few studies have benefited from high spatial and temporal resolution data due to the difficulty of accessing reliable, fine-grained and high-quality annotated samples to support their hypotheses. Therefore, we introduce a temporal patch-based dataset of Canadian croplands, enriched with labels retrieved from the Canadian Annual Crop Inventory. The dataset contains 78,536 manually verified high-resolution (10 m/pixel, 640 x 640 m) geo-referenced images from 10 crop classes collected over four crop production years (2017-2020) and five months (June-October). Each instance contains 12 spectral bands, an RGB image, and additional vegetation index bands. Individually, each category contains at least 4,800 images. Moreover, as a benchmark, we provide models and source code that allow a user to predict the crop class using a single image (ResNet, DenseNet, EfficientNet) or a sequence of images (LRCN, 3D-CNN) from the same location. In perspective, we expect this evolving dataset to propel the creation of robust agro-environmental models that can accelerate the comprehension of complex agricultural regions by providing accurate and continuous monitoring of land cover.