Early-season area estimation of the winter wheat crop as a strategic product is important for decision-makers. Multi-temporal images are the best tool to measure early-season winter wheat crops, but there are issues with classification. Classification of multi-temporal images is affected by factors such as training sample size, temporal resolution, vegetation index (VI) type, temporal gradient of spectral bands and VIs, classifiers, and values missed under cloudy conditions. This study addresses the effect of the temporal resolution and VIs, along with the spectral and VIs gradient on the random forest (RF) classifier when missing data occurs in multi-temporal images. To investigate the appropriate temporal resolution for image acquisition, a study area is selected on an overlapping area between two Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) paths. In the proposed method, the missing data from cloudy pixels are retrieved using the average of the k-nearest cloudless pixels in the feature space. Next, multi-temporal image analysis is performed by considering different scenarios provided by decision-makers for the desired crop types, which should be extracted early in the season in the study areas. The classification results obtained by RF improved by 2.2% when the temporally-missing data were retrieved using the proposed method. Moreover, the experimental results demonstrated that when the temporal resolution of Landsat-8 is increased to one week, the classification task can be conducted earlier with slightly better overall accuracy (OA) and kappa values. The effect of incorporating VIs along with the temporal gradients of spectral bands and VIs into the RF classifier improved the OA by 3.1% and the kappa value by 6.6%, on average. The results show that if only three optimum images from seasonal changes in crops are available, the temporal gradient of the VIs and spectral bands becomes the primary tool available for discriminating wheat from barley. The results also showed that if wheat and barley are considered as single class versus other classes, with the use of images associated with 162 and 163 paths, both crops can be classified in March (at the beginning of the growth stage) with an overall accuracy of 97.1% and kappa coefficient of 93.5%.

The early-season area estimation of the winter wheat crop as a strategic product is important for decision makers. Classification of multi-temporal images is an approach which is affected by many factors like appropriate training sample size, proper frequency and acquisition times, vegetation indices (VIs) type, temporal gradient of spectral bands and VIs, appropriate classifier and missed values because of cloudy conditions. This paper addresses the impact of appropriate frequency and acquisition times and VIs type along with the spectral and VI gradient on random forest (RF) classifier when missed values exist in multi-temporal images. To investigate the appropriate temporal resolution for image acquisition, the study area was selected on an overlapping area between two LDCM paths. In our developed method, the miss values of cloudy bands for each pixel are retrieved by the mean of k-nearest ordinary pixels. Then the multi-temporal image analysis is performed by considering different scenarios provided by decision makers in terms of desired crop types that should be extracted at early-season in the study areas. The classification results obtained by the RF decrease by 1.6% when temporally missed values retrieved by the proposed method, which is an acceptable result. Moreover, the experimental results demonstrated that if temporal resolution of Landsat 8 increased to one week the classification task can be conducted earlier with almost better results in terms of OA and kappa. The impact of incorporating VIs along with the temporal gradients of spectral bands and VIs as new features in RF demonstrated that the OA and Kappa are improved 3.1% and 6.6%, respectively. Furthermore, the obtained result showed that if only one image from seasonal changes of crops is available, the temporal gradient of VIs and spectral bands play the main role to discriminate remarkably wheat from barley. The experiments also demonstrated that if both wheat and barley merge to a single class the crop area can be estimated two months earlier with 97.1 and 93.5 in terms of OA and kappa, respectively.