The ecological quality of large-scale farms is a critical determinant of crop growth. In this paper, an ecological assessment procedure suitable for agricultural regions should be developed based on an improved remote sensing ecological index (IRSEI), which introduces an integrated salinity index (ISI) tailored to the salinized soil characteristics in farming areas and incorporates ecological indices such as the greenness index (NDVI), the humidity index (WET), the dryness index (NDBSI), and the heat index (LST). The results indicate that between 2013 and 2022, the mean IRSEI increasing from 0.500 in 2013 to 0.826 in 2020 before decreasing to 0.646 in 2022. From 2013 to 2022, the area of the farm that experienced slight to significant improvements in ecological quality reached 1419.91 km², accounting for 71.94% of the total farm area. An analysis of different land cover types revealed that the IRSEI performed more reliably than did the original RSEI method. Correlation analysis based on crop yields showed that the IRSEI method was more strongly correlated with yield than was the RSEI method. Therefore, the proposed IRSEI method offers a rapid and effective new means of monitoring ecological quality for agricultural planting areas characterized by soil salinization, and it is more effective than the traditional RSEI method.

Image segmentation technology, which can be used to completely partition a remote sensing image into non-overlapping regions in the image space, plays an indispensable role in high-resolution remote sensing image classification. Recently, the segmentation methods that combine segmenting with merging have attracted researchers’ attention. However, the existing methods ignore the fact that the same parameters must be applied to every segmented geo-object, and fail to consider the homogeneity between adjacent geo-objects. This paper develops an improved remote sensing image segmentation method to overcome this limitation. The proposed method is a hybrid method (split-and-merge). First, a watershed algorithm based on pre-processing is used to split the image to form initial segments. Second, the fast lambda-schedule algorithm based on a common boundary length penalty is used to merge the initial segments to obtain the final segmentation. For this experiment, we used GF-1 images with three spatial resolutions: 2 m, 8 m and 16 m. Six different test areas were chosen from the GF-1 images to demonstrate the effectiveness of the improved method, and the objective function (F (v, I)), intrasegment variance (v) and Moran’s index were used to evaluate the segmentation accuracy. The validation results indicated that the improved segmentation method produced satisfactory segmentation results for GF-1 images (average F (v, I) = 0.1064, v = 0.0428 and I = 0.17).

With the increasing requirements of precision agriculture for massive and various kinds of data, remote sensing technology has become indispensable in acquiring the necessary data for precision agriculture. Understanding the spatial variability of a target soil variable (i.e., soil mapping) is a critical issue in solving many agricultural problems. Field sampling is one of the most commonly used technologies for soil mapping, but sample sizes are restricted by resources, such as field labor, soil physicochemical analysis, and funding. In this paper, we proposed a sampling design method with both good spatial coverage and feature space coverage to achieve more precise spatial variability of farm field-level target soil variables for limited sample sizes. The proposed method used the super-grid to achieve good spatial coverage, and it took advantage of remote sensing products that were highly correlated with the target soil property (SOM content) to achieve good feature space coverage. For the experiments, we employed the ordinary kriging (OK) method to map the soil organic matter (SOM) content. The different sized super-grid comparison experiments showed that the 400 × 400 m² super-grid had the highest SOM content mapping accuracy. Then, we compared the proposed method to regular grid sampling (good spatial coverage) and k-means sampling (good feature space coverage), and the experimental results indicated that the proposed method had greater potential in the selection of representative samples that could improve the SOM content mapping accuracy.

Image segmentation is of significance because it can provide objects that are the minimum analysis units for geographic object-based image analysis (GEOBIA). Most segmentation methods usually set parameters to identify geo-objects, and different parameter settings lead to different segmentation results; thus, parameter optimization is critical to obtain satisfactory segmentation results. Currently, many parameter optimization methods have been developed and successfully applied to the identification of single geo-objects. However, few studies have focused on the recognition of the union of different types of geo-objects (semantic geo-objects), such as a park. The recognition of semantic geo-objects is likely more crucial than that of single geo-objects because the former type of recognition is more correlated with the human perception. This paper proposes an approach to recognize semantic geo-objects. The key concept is that a single geo-object is the smallest component unit of a semantic geo-object, and semantic geo-objects are recognized by iteratively merging single geo-objects. Thus, the optimal scale of the semantic geo-objects is determined by iteratively recognizing the optimal scales of single geo-objects and using them as the initiation point of the reset scale parameter optimization interval. In this paper, we adopt the multiresolution segmentation (MRS) method to segment Gaofen-1 images and tested three scale parameter optimization methods to validate the proposed approach. The results show that the proposed approach can determine the scale parameters, which can produce semantic geo-objects.

Farm field units are the fundamental management units of modern precision agriculture, and accurate identification of their geographic boundaries is essential for the data management of farmland soil and nutrients. However, traditional manual vectorization methods are inefficient and costly. To address this issue, this study proposes an automated farm field unit identification framework based on remote sensing image segmentation and parameter optimization. Starting from the framework of Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA), the framework employs the multiresolution segmentation (MRS) algorithm combined with intra-segment homogeneity and inter-segment heterogeneity indicators, and iteratively determines the optimal scale parameters through three unsupervised segmentation parameter optimization (USPO) methods, namely the methods proposed by Espindola et al. (EUSPO), Zhang et al. (ZUSPO), and Johnson et al. (JUSPO), to achieve automatic identification of farm field information. The framework was evaluated on eleven production teams of the Tenihe Farm, a large-scale intensive farm in Hulunbuir, China, using two scenes of Landsat 8 OLI imagery acquired on 18 September 2019 (multispectral bands pan-sharpened to 15 m, with the red, green, blue, and near-infrared bands used for segmentation), taking field-investigation-verified farm field vector maps as the reference. The results show that the identification accuracy of farm field units generally reaches over 80%. The main contribution of this study lies in extending USPO methods from segmentation quality evaluation to automated farm field vector extraction in precision agriculture, and in providing a systematic horizontal comparison of three USPO combination strategies under large-scale heterogeneous agricultural landscapes, which reveals that the JUSPO method, with its F-measure fusion strategy, achieves the most robust performance in most teams. These findings verify the effectiveness and application potential of the proposed framework.