Tropical Rice Mapping Using Time-Series SAR Images and ESF-Seg Model in Hainan, China, from 2019 to 2023

Tropical and subtropical Asia is the major rice-producing region in the world, but the complexity of the cropping system and the diversity of the topography bring challenges to the accurate monitoring of rice cultivation. To address this difficulty, a new deep learning model, ESF-Seg, is proposed in...

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Main Authors: Yazhe Xie, Lu Xu, Hong Zhang, Mingyang Song, Ji Ge, Fan Wu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2025-01-01
Series:Remote Sensing
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/17/2/209
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author Yazhe Xie
Lu Xu
Hong Zhang
Mingyang Song
Ji Ge
Fan Wu
author_facet Yazhe Xie
Lu Xu
Hong Zhang
Mingyang Song
Ji Ge
Fan Wu
author_sort Yazhe Xie
collection DOAJ
description Tropical and subtropical Asia is the major rice-producing region in the world, but the complexity of the cropping system and the diversity of the topography bring challenges to the accurate monitoring of rice cultivation. To address this difficulty, a new deep learning model, ESF-Seg, is proposed in this study to extract the annual tropical rice distribution using monthly averaged time-series Sentinel-1 VH data. The ESF-Seg adopts the Efficient Adaptive Sparse Transformer (EAT) to remove redundant information from input features. The Channel Attention Bridge Block (CAB) and Spatial Attention Bridge Block (SAB) modules are introduced to refine the information. Meanwhile, with the FreqFusion-KAN (FreqK) module, the loss of information can be reduced through the multi-scale feature fusion strategy. The proposed method is evaluated in the Hainan Province of China, an important tropical arable zone with diverse crop resources and complicated croplands. First, ablation experiments are conducted. Compared to the classical SegFormer model, the ESF-Seg model improves on the mIOU by 4.99% and on the mPA by 2.65%. Subsequently, compared to the RF, U-Net, and the original SegFormer model, the overall accuracy (OA) of the ESF-Seg model on the validation samples increased by 11.02%, 2.01%, and 1.33%, and the F1 score improved by 0.0756, 0.0624, and 0.0490, reaching 98.31% and 0.9506, respectively. Furthermore, products showing the annual rice distribution from 2019 to 2023 in Hainan are generated, which exhibit good alignments with the statistical data, surpassing other existing products with an RMSE of 5.4004 Kha. As indicated by the rice mapping products, the proposed method preserves the integrity of the rice parcels in the fragmented croplands, thus providing a new opportunity for the continuous monitoring of tropical rice distribution with high accuracy.
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spelling doaj-art-25963bb818b94fd5995f54e05148706c2025-01-24T13:47:44ZengMDPI AGRemote Sensing2072-42922025-01-0117220910.3390/rs17020209Tropical Rice Mapping Using Time-Series SAR Images and ESF-Seg Model in Hainan, China, from 2019 to 2023Yazhe Xie0Lu Xu1Hong Zhang2Mingyang Song3Ji Ge4Fan Wu5Key Laboratory of Earth Observation of Hainan Province, Hainan Aerospace Information Research Institute, Sanya 572029, ChinaKey Laboratory of Earth Observation of Hainan Province, Hainan Aerospace Information Research Institute, Sanya 572029, ChinaKey Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, ChinaKey Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, ChinaKey Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, ChinaKey Laboratory of Earth Observation of Hainan Province, Hainan Aerospace Information Research Institute, Sanya 572029, ChinaTropical and subtropical Asia is the major rice-producing region in the world, but the complexity of the cropping system and the diversity of the topography bring challenges to the accurate monitoring of rice cultivation. To address this difficulty, a new deep learning model, ESF-Seg, is proposed in this study to extract the annual tropical rice distribution using monthly averaged time-series Sentinel-1 VH data. The ESF-Seg adopts the Efficient Adaptive Sparse Transformer (EAT) to remove redundant information from input features. The Channel Attention Bridge Block (CAB) and Spatial Attention Bridge Block (SAB) modules are introduced to refine the information. Meanwhile, with the FreqFusion-KAN (FreqK) module, the loss of information can be reduced through the multi-scale feature fusion strategy. The proposed method is evaluated in the Hainan Province of China, an important tropical arable zone with diverse crop resources and complicated croplands. First, ablation experiments are conducted. Compared to the classical SegFormer model, the ESF-Seg model improves on the mIOU by 4.99% and on the mPA by 2.65%. Subsequently, compared to the RF, U-Net, and the original SegFormer model, the overall accuracy (OA) of the ESF-Seg model on the validation samples increased by 11.02%, 2.01%, and 1.33%, and the F1 score improved by 0.0756, 0.0624, and 0.0490, reaching 98.31% and 0.9506, respectively. Furthermore, products showing the annual rice distribution from 2019 to 2023 in Hainan are generated, which exhibit good alignments with the statistical data, surpassing other existing products with an RMSE of 5.4004 Kha. As indicated by the rice mapping products, the proposed method preserves the integrity of the rice parcels in the fragmented croplands, thus providing a new opportunity for the continuous monitoring of tropical rice distribution with high accuracy.https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/17/2/209rice mappingSARSentinel-1deep learningSegFormer
spellingShingle Yazhe Xie
Lu Xu
Hong Zhang
Mingyang Song
Ji Ge
Fan Wu
Tropical Rice Mapping Using Time-Series SAR Images and ESF-Seg Model in Hainan, China, from 2019 to 2023
Remote Sensing
rice mapping
SAR
Sentinel-1
deep learning
SegFormer
title Tropical Rice Mapping Using Time-Series SAR Images and ESF-Seg Model in Hainan, China, from 2019 to 2023
title_full Tropical Rice Mapping Using Time-Series SAR Images and ESF-Seg Model in Hainan, China, from 2019 to 2023
title_fullStr Tropical Rice Mapping Using Time-Series SAR Images and ESF-Seg Model in Hainan, China, from 2019 to 2023
title_full_unstemmed Tropical Rice Mapping Using Time-Series SAR Images and ESF-Seg Model in Hainan, China, from 2019 to 2023
title_short Tropical Rice Mapping Using Time-Series SAR Images and ESF-Seg Model in Hainan, China, from 2019 to 2023
title_sort tropical rice mapping using time series sar images and esf seg model in hainan china from 2019 to 2023
topic rice mapping
SAR
Sentinel-1
deep learning
SegFormer
url https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/17/2/209
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