arXiv Machine Learning

Intercomparison of Machine Learning Algorithms for Remote Sensing-based In-season Crop Mapping

arXiv:2606. 05731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In-season crop type mapping is critical for food security in the face of increasingly extreme climate-related threats to crops.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

AgroBench: A Reproducible Multimodal Benchmark for Weakly Supervised Crop Yield Learning from County Statistics and Pixel Observations

AgroBench is a reproducible benchmark that converts U.S. county-level crop yield statistics into weakly supervised pixel‑level crop time series. The data generation pipeline fuses USDA yield data with land cover masks, Sentinel‑2 and Sentinel‑1 imagery, climatic variables, and terrain information to produce multimodal sequences for individual crop pixels across the growing season. The benchmark includes over 13 million observations from 788,654 crop pixels, covering 5,107 county‑year combinations for five major U.S. crops from 2017 to 2024, and establishes a Leave‑One‑Year‑Out evaluation protocol with baseline machine learning results.

By Udaiveer Singh, Rajiv Ranjan, Shashank Tamaskar, Dharmendra Saraswat
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 29

Benchmarking Geospatial Foundation Models for Agriculture Applications

Geospatial foundation models pretrained on satellite imagery promise broad generalization across remote sensing tasks and regions, but their geographic transferability has not been systematically tested, especially in agriculture applications. This paper presents a controlled benchmark that evaluates three models, Prithvi, SpectralGPT, and SatMAE, on multi-temporal crop segmentation and change detection across four U.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

From Foundation Embeddings to Cropland Maps: Label Efficiency, Temporal Transferability and Independent Human Validation

The study evaluates the use of frozen geospatial foundation embeddings (AlphaEarth) for mapping cultivated versus non‑cultivated land in Maine. Using 192 spatially separated patches and USDA Cropland Data Layer labels, a lightweight classifier achieved 93.7% overall accuracy without fine‑tuning, and a nearest‑class‑centroid rule reached 90.2%. A balanced sample of 60,000 labeled pixels was nearly as effective as the full 8.6 million‑pixel pool, and classifiers trained in one year remained accurate across 2018‑2023. In a blind human validation of 385 points, the AlphaEarth‑plus‑random‑forest map matched 95.3% of the consensus, outperforming the CDL reference (91.7%).

By Mohammad Ammar Mughees, Giovanni Montefoschi, Zhongxin Chen, Maria Antonia Brovelli
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

An Input-Frugal Deep Learning Framework for Weather-Driven National Crop-Yield Forecasting: A Case Study of Brazilian Soybean

The paper introduces a lightweight deep learning framework that forecasts Brazilian soybean yields using only routine weather data and two simple static inputs (crop year and agro-environmental label). Across 20 seasons, transformer-based models achieved the highest accuracy, outperforming traditional ridge regression and a moving‑average baseline by nearly 48%. Ablation studies show that the static inputs and spatial expansion improve performance without adding complexity, and SHAP analysis highlights the importance of crop year and weather variables in driving yield variations.

By Fernando Dupin da Cunha Mello (Stricto Sensu Department, SENAI CIMATEC University, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil), Prashant Kumar (Global Centre for Clean Air Research), Erick G. Sperandio Nascimento (Stricto Sensu Department, SENAI CIMATEC University, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil)
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Detection of Christmas tree plantations from high-resolution aerial imagery. A case study in the French Morvan

The study presents a new approach to detect Christmas tree plantations in high‑resolution aerial imagery, treating the task as a rare‑target semantic segmentation problem. It introduces a Hard Negative Mining strategy that significantly improves precision‑recall performance, achieving an IoU of 0.733 and an F1‑score of 0.846 on a 2020 test set. Temporal transfer experiments demonstrate the model’s ability to generalize across years, while large‑scale validation highlights the challenge posed by the plantations’ small spatial footprint.

By Francesca Razzano, Emanuele Dalsasso, Adrien Baysse-Lain\'e, Silvia Liberata Ullo, Gilda Schirinzi, Jocelyn Chanussot