Machine Learning Applied to Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 Multispectral and Medium-Resolution Satellite Imagery for the Detection of Rice Production Areas in Nganjuk, East Java, Indonesia

Statistics Indonesia (BPS) has been introducing the use of Area Sampling Frame (ASF) surveys from 2018 to estimate rice production areas, although the process continues to suffer from the high costs of human and other resources. To support this type of conventional field survey, a more scalable and inexpensive approach using publicly-available remote sensing data, for example from the Sentinel 2 and Landsat-8 satellites, has been explored. In this research, we compare the performance gain from Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 images using a multiple composite-index enriched machine learning classifier to detect rice production areas located in Nganjuk, East Java, Indonesia as a case study area. We build a detection model from a set of machine learning classifiers, Decision Tree (CART), Support Vector Machine, Logistic Regression, Ensemble Bagging Methods (Random Forest and Extra Trees), and Ensemble Boosting Methods (AdaBoost and XGBoost). The composite indices consist of the NDVI and EVI for agricultural and forest areas, NDWI for water and cloud, and NDBI, NDTI, and BSI for built-up areas, fallows, and asphalt-based roads. Validated by k-fold cross-validation, Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 achieved F1-scores of 0.930 and 0.919 respectively at the scale of 30 meters per pixel. Using a 10 meter resolution per pixel for the Sentinel-2 imagery showed an increased F1-score of up to 0.971. Our evaluation shows that the higher spatial resolution imagery of Sentinel-2 achieves a better prediction, not only performance-wise, but also as a better representation of actual conditions