Automatic detection of crop lodging from multitemporal satellite data based on the isolation forest algorithm

Rapid identification of crop lodging has implications for optimizing disaster prevention and mitigation measures. This study proposes a sequentially integrated algorithm for crop lodging identification, which first automatically extracts lodged and non-lodged samples based on the isolation forest algorithm from the screened features dataset and then uses a supervised classifier for lodging identification. Taking the crop lodging disaster caused by the super typhoon "Maysak" in Bohetai Township as an example, we calculated 162 feature indices from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite data pre- and post-disaster and screened the optimal features. Then, the abnormal scores of the cultivated-land pixels were calculated using the isolation forest algorithm. After that, we calculated the coefficient of variation (CV) of the abnormal scores of each group, extracted the lodged and non-lodged samples based on the cumulative CV contribution rate, and input samples into three supervised classifiers (random forest, maximum likelihood, and support vector machine) to identify lodged crop pixels. The results showed that feature screening increased the identification accuracy of crop lodging by more than 10% and difference features of short-wave infrared (SWIR) and red edge bands contributed significantly to the identification. The accuracy of crop lodging automatic identification was verified using samples obtained from visual interpretation and digitization of UAV images as reference data and the overall accuracy reached 78%. The proposed method can simultaneously recognize lodging of different crop types without the need to select lodged samples and extract lodged ranges for each crop. With low data acquisition costs and high automation, the proposed method has promising applications in agricultural disaster emergency management and agricultural insurance loss assessment.