Model-Agnostic, Temperature-Informed Sampling Enhances Cross-Year Crop Mapping with Deep Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Turkoglu, Mehmet Ozgur, Ledain, Selene, Aasen, Helge
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Turkoglu, Mehmet Ozgur
Ledain, Selene
Aasen, Helge
author_facet Turkoglu, Mehmet Ozgur
Ledain, Selene
Aasen, Helge
contents Crop type classification using optical satellite time series remains limited in its ability to generalize across seasons, particularly when crop phenology shifts due to inter-annual weather variability. This hampers real-world applicability in scenarios where current-year labels are unavailable. In addition, uncertainty quantification is often overlooked, which reduces the reliability of such approaches for operational crop monitoring. Inspired by ecophysiological principles of plant growth, we propose a simple, model-agnostic Thermal-Time-based Temporal Sampling (T3S) method that replaces calendar time with thermal time. By subsampling time series in this biologically meaningful way, our method highlights key periods within the growing season while reducing temporal redundancy and noise. We evaluate the T3S on a multi-year Sentinel-2 dataset covering the entirety of Switzerland, which allows us to assess all applied methods on unseen years. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines, our approach yields substantial improvements in classification accuracy and, critically, provides well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. Moreover, the T3S method excels in low-data regimes and enables significantly more accurate early-season classification. With just 10% of the training labels, it outperforms the current baseline in both accuracy and uncertainty calibration, and by the end of June, it achieves a performance similar to the full-season baseline model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_12885
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Model-Agnostic, Temperature-Informed Sampling Enhances Cross-Year Crop Mapping with Deep Learning
Turkoglu, Mehmet Ozgur
Ledain, Selene
Aasen, Helge
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image and Video Processing
Crop type classification using optical satellite time series remains limited in its ability to generalize across seasons, particularly when crop phenology shifts due to inter-annual weather variability. This hampers real-world applicability in scenarios where current-year labels are unavailable. In addition, uncertainty quantification is often overlooked, which reduces the reliability of such approaches for operational crop monitoring. Inspired by ecophysiological principles of plant growth, we propose a simple, model-agnostic Thermal-Time-based Temporal Sampling (T3S) method that replaces calendar time with thermal time. By subsampling time series in this biologically meaningful way, our method highlights key periods within the growing season while reducing temporal redundancy and noise. We evaluate the T3S on a multi-year Sentinel-2 dataset covering the entirety of Switzerland, which allows us to assess all applied methods on unseen years. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines, our approach yields substantial improvements in classification accuracy and, critically, provides well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. Moreover, the T3S method excels in low-data regimes and enables significantly more accurate early-season classification. With just 10% of the training labels, it outperforms the current baseline in both accuracy and uncertainty calibration, and by the end of June, it achieves a performance similar to the full-season baseline model.
title Model-Agnostic, Temperature-Informed Sampling Enhances Cross-Year Crop Mapping with Deep Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12885