Processing Sentinel-2 image time series for developing a real-time cropland mask

The exploitation of new high revisit frequency earth observations by the future Sentinel-2 satellite is clearly an important opportunity for global agricultural monitoring. In this context, the Sentinel-2Agriculture project aims at producing algorithms working on large geographical areas having different climates and different agricultural systems. In the framework of this project, the construction of a near-real-time deliverable cropland mask product has been studied here. A set of 12 selected test sites are used to benchmark the proposed method with regard to the diversity of agro-ecological context, the various landscape patterns, the different agriculture practices and the actual satellite observation conditions. The classification results yield very promising accuracies achieving around 90 % at the end of the agricultural season.