Meta-learning For Few-Shot Time Series Crop Type Classification: A Benchmark On The EuroCropsML Dataset

Spatial imbalances in crop type data pose significant challenges for accurate classification in remote sensing applications. Algorithms aiming at transferring knowledge from data-rich to data-scarce tasks have thus surged in popularity. However, despite their effectiveness in previous evaluations, their performance in challenging real-world applications is unclear and needs to be evaluated. This study benchmarks transfer learning and several meta-learning algorithms, including (First-Order) Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning ((FO)-MAML), Almost No Inner Loop (ANIL), and Task-Informed Meta-Learning (TIML), on the real-world EuroCropsML time series dataset, which combines farmer-reported crop data with Sentinel-2 satellite observations from Estonia, Latvia, and Portugal. Our findings indicate that MAML-based meta-learning algorithms achieve slightly higher accuracy compared to simpler transfer learning methods when applied to crop type classification tasks in Estonia after pre-training on data from Latvia. However, this improvement comes at the cost of increased computational demands and training time. Moreover, we find that the transfer of knowledge between geographically disparate regions, such as Estonia and Portugal, poses significant challenges to all investigated algorithms. These insights underscore the trade-offs between accuracy and computational resource requirements in selecting machine learning methods for real-world crop type classification tasks and highlight the difficulties of transferring knowledge between different regions of the Earth. To facilitate future research in this domain, we present the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating transfer and meta-learning methods for crop type classification under real-world conditions. The corresponding code is publicly available at https://github.com/dida-do/eurocrops-meta-learning.

EuroCropsML: A Time Series Benchmark Dataset For Few-Shot Crop Type Classification

We introduce EuroCropsML, an analysis-ready remote sensing machine learning dataset for time series crop type classification of agricultural parcels in Europe. It is the first dataset designed to benchmark transnational few-shot crop type classification algorithms that supports advancements in algorithmic development and research comparability. It comprises 706 683 multi-class labeled data points across 176 classes, featuring annual time series of per-parcel median pixel values from Sentinel-2 L1C data for 2021, along with crop type labels and spatial coordinates. Based on the open-source EuroCrops collection, EuroCropsML is publicly available on Zenodo.