Seed maize and common maize plots have different planting patterns and variety types. Identification of seed maize is the basis for seed maize growth monitoring, seed quality and common maize seed supply. In this paper, a random forest (RF) classifier is used to develop an approach for seed maize fields’ identification, using the time series vegetation indexes (VIs) calculated from multispectral data acquired from Landsat 8 and Gaofen 1 satellite (GF-1), field sample data, and texture features of Gaofen 2 satellite (GF-2) panchromatic data. Huocheng and Hutubi County in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China were chosen as study area. The results show that RF performs well with the combination of six VIs (normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), enhanced vegetation index (EVI), triangle vegetation index (TVI), ratio vegetation index (RVI), normalized difference water index (NDWI) and difference vegetation index (DVI)) and texture features based on a grey-level co-occurrence matrix. The classification based on “spectrum + texture” information has higher overall, user and producer accuracies than that of spectral information alone. Using the “spectrum + texture” method, the overall accuracy of classification in Huocheng County is 95.90%, the Kappa coefficient is 0.92, and the producer accuracy for seed maize fields is 93.91%. The overall accuracy of the classification in Hutubi County is 97.79%, the Kappa coefficient is 0.95, and the producer accuracy for seed maize fields is 97.65%. Therefore, RF classifier inputted with high-resolution remote-sensing image features can distinguish two kinds of planting patterns (seed and common) and varieties types (inbred and hybrid) of maize and can be used to identify and map a wide range of seed maize fields. However, this method requires a large amount of sample data, so how to effectively use and improve it in areas lacking samples needs further research.

The accurate and timely access to the spatial distribution information of crops is of great importance for agricultural production management. Although widely used, supervised classification mapping requires a large number of field samples, and is consequently costly in terms of time and money. In order to reduce the need for sample size, this paper proposes an unsupervised classification method based on principal components isometric binning (PCIB). In particular, principal component analysis (PCA) dimensionality reduction is applied to the classification features, followed by the division of the top k principal components into equidistant bins. Bins of the same category are subsequently merged as a class label. Multitemporal Gaofen 1 satellite (GF-1) remote sensing images were collected over the southwest of Hulin City and Luobei County of Hegang City, Heilongjiang Province, China in order to map crop types in 2016 and 2017. Our proposed method was compared with commonly used classifiers (random forest, K-means and Iterative Self-Organizing Data Analysis Techniques Algorithm (ISODATA)). Results demonstrate PCIB and random forest to have the highest classification accuracies, reaching 82% in 2016 in the southwest of Hulin City. In Luobei County in 2016, the accuracies of PCIB and random forest were determined as 81% and 82%, respectively. It can be concluded that the overall accuracy of our proposed method meets the basic requirements of classification accuracy. Despite exhibiting a lower accuracy than that of random forest, PCIB does not require a large field sample size, thus making it more suitable for large-scale crop mapping.