New DTW-based method to similarity search in sugar cane regions represented by climate and remote sensing time series

Brazil is an important sugar cane producer, which is the main resource for ethanol production, a renewable source of energy. This agricultural commodity is important to the country economy, becoming fundamental to improve models that assist the crops monitoring process. Vegetation indexes originated from remote sensing images and agrometeorological indexes can be combined to represent sugar cane fields in a regional scale. However, finding different regions with similar patterns to classify or analyze their characteristics is a non-trivial task. Accordingly, this paper presents a method to find similar sugar cane fields represented by series of vegetation and agrometeorological indexes. The proposed method combines a weighted distance function with an algorithm to find similar objects. Results were coincident in the most cases with the classification done by experts, finding regions with similar characteristics of climate and productivity. Consequently, this approach can help in decision making processes by agricultural entrepreneurs.