A Decade of Wheat Mapping for Lebanon
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Apr 15, 2025
Abstract
Wheat accounts for approximately 20% of the world's caloric intake, making it
a vital component of global food security. Given this importance, mapping wheat
fields plays a crucial role in enabling various stakeholders, including policy
makers, researchers, and agricultural organizations, to make informed decisions
regarding food security, supply chain management, and resource allocation. In
this paper, we tackle the problem of accurately mapping wheat fields out of
satellite images by introducing an improved pipeline for winter wheat
segmentation, as well as presenting a case study on a decade-long analysis of
wheat mapping in Lebanon. We integrate a Temporal Spatial Vision Transformer
(TSViT) with Parameter-Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT) and a novel post-processing
pipeline based on the Fields of The World (FTW) framework. Our proposed
pipeline addresses key challenges encountered in existing approaches, such as
the clustering of small agricultural parcels in a single large field. By
merging wheat segmentation with precise field boundary extraction, our method
produces geometrically coherent and semantically rich maps that enable us to
perform in-depth analysis such as tracking crop rotation pattern over years.
Extensive evaluations demonstrate improved boundary delineation and field-level
precision, establishing the potential of the proposed framework in operational
agricultural monitoring and historical trend analysis. By allowing for accurate
mapping of wheat fields, this work lays the foundation for a range of critical
studies and future advances, including crop monitoring and yield estimation.
