Papers for

environmental management teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Unmixmamba improves crop mapping from modis time series data

UnMixMamba: Unmixing Guided State Space Subpixel Mapping of Crops from MODIS Time Series

Abstract: Subpixel mapping (SPM) of crop types from \SI{250}{m} Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) time series to field-scale Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) labels supports acreage estimation and agricultural monitoring. Three difficulties remain: (i)~spectral-temporal coupling and mixed pixels that break direct coarse-to-fine classifiers; (ii)~intra-class endmember variability that a single spectrum per crop cannot capture; and (iii)~uniform refinement on the high-resolution (HR) grid, which treats every subpixel the same, so most of the effort goes to easy pixels while errors remain in the minority class. UnMixMamba addresses them as follows. For~(i), a temporal-spectral-spatial decoupled (TSSD) factorization estimates simplex fractions and drives AAFC classification from the same mixture field, instead of mapping low-resolution (LR) observations directly to HR logits. For~(ii), \(\times 8\) abundance super-resolution and a learnable per-crop variant endmember bank reconstruct the MODIS cube at LR and HR under a linear mixing model. For~(iii), the predicted crop fractions decide where a fixed Mamba token budget is spent, so HR refinement focuses on the minority class instead of the full grid. On Alberta 2015 under a fixed spatial-block protocol, UnMixMamba reaches OA 0.8397, mIoU 0.6640, AA 0.7837, and Kappa 0.7715, ahead of ST-DRes, ESPCN, FineCrop, AgriFM, and classical SPM baselines. The task is closed-set four-crop mapping inside a known agricultural mask.

Wed 28 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Mapping crops accurately using satellite images is tricky because each pixel can contain a mix of crops, and crops look different over time. The authors created UnMixMamba, a method that separates these mixed signals by considering how crop appearances change across time and space. It uses smart techniques to focus extra attention on crops that are harder to identify correctly, improving the overall mapping accuracy. This method was tested on satellite data from Alberta and outperformed previous approaches.
Open → 2610.38507v1