Cropland product fusion method based on the overall consistency difference: A case study of China

Abstract

There is inconsistency between the existing remote sensing cropland products, whose accuracy of estimated cropland area and spatial positioning needs to be improved. The existing generalized methods of generating synergy cropland products for improving the accuracy of existing products do not consider the overall consistency difference between the different products in each grid cell in the fusion process. To reduce the impact of the abnormal estimated cropland areas of the individual cropland products on the results, this paper proposes a method of generating a synergy cropland product by fusing the multiple existing cropland products, based on the overall consistency difference. In the proposed method, the process of fusing the multiple existing cropland products is based on the overall consistency difference of the estimated cropland area of all the cropland products in each grid cell. The synergy cropland product is then generated after determining the best combination level with the cropland statistics. In this study, we set 2010 as the base year, and used the proposed method to conduct experiments with four remote sensing cropland products: GlobCover 2009, MODIS Cropland, MCD12Q1, and FROM-GLC within China, and national cropland statistics. The results show that the synergy cropland product generated by the proposed method has a higher accuracy of cropland area estimation and spatial positioning than the results obtained by the generalized model, as well as the original products.