Comparison of VHR panchromatic texture features for tillage mapping

Agricultural practices are major drivers of water flows in cultivated landscapes. Especially, the spatial arrangements and connectivities of tilled/untilled fields have a strong impact onto run off and soil erosion at the landscape and watershed scales. Very high spatial resolution satellite images offer the possibility to classify tilled vs. untilled fields at a large scale. This paper compares the importance of various VHR texture features for tillage mapping. Classical texture features such as coocurrence Haralick descriptors, Gabor and SIFT-based descriptors are studied. The random forest classifier is used to assess feature importance. A 50 cm panchromatic WorldView-I image is used for experiments. Very good classification accuracies of 83.4 % and 94.5 % are reached.