Effects of training parameter concept and sample size in possibilistic c-means classifier for pigeon pea specific crop mapping

This research work aims to study the effect of training parameter concept and sample size in the process of classification by using a fuzzy Possibilistic c-Means (PCM) approach for Pigeon Pea specific crop mapping. For specific class extraction, the “mean” of the training data is considered as a training parameter of the classification algorithm. In this study, we proposed an “Individual Sample as Mean” (ISM) approach where the individual training sample is accounted as a mean parameter for the fuzzy PCM classifier. In order to avoid the spectral overlap of target Pigeon pea crop with other crops in the study area, a temporal indices database was generated from Sentinel 2A/2B satellite images acquired during the 2019–2020 Pigeon Pea crop cycle. The spectral dimensionality of temporal data was reduced to extract the required bands to achieve maximum enhancement of the target crop class in the temporal data. Further, the training sample size was increased to study the heterogeneity within the class in the classified output. The proposed ISM approach delivered a higher mean membership difference (MMD) between the Pigeon Pea crop and the co-cultivated Cotton crop as compared to the conventional mean method. This indicated that a better separation was achieved between the target crop and the spectrally similar crop grown, that were cultivated in the same study area. When the sample size was gradually increased from 5 to 60, the MMD values within the Pigeon Pea test fields remained in the range 0.013–0.02, thereby implying that the proposed algorithm works better even with a small number of training samples. The heterogeneity was better handled using the proposed ISM approach since the variance obtained within Pigeon Pea field was only 0.008, as compared to that of 0.02 achieved using the conventional mean approach