Optimal Bands Combination Selection for Extracting Garlic Planting Area with Multi-Temporal Sentinel-2 Imagery

Garlic is one of the main economic crops in China. Accurate and timely extraction of the garlic planting area is critical for adjusting the agricultural planting structure and implementing rural policy actions. Crop extraction methods based on remote sensing usually use spectral–temporal features. Still, for garlic extraction, most methods simply combine all multi-temporal images. There has been a lack of research on each band’s function in each multi-temporal image and optimal bands combination. To systematically explore the potential of the multi-temporal method for garlic extraction, we obtained a series of Sentinel-2 images in the whole garlic growth cycle. The importance of each band in all these images was ranked by the random forest (RF) method. According to the importance score of each band, eight different multi-temporal combination schemes were designed. The RF classifier was employed to extract garlic planting area, and the accuracy of the eight schemes was compared. The results show that (1) the Scheme VI (the top 39 bands in importance score) achieved the best accuracy of 98.65%, which is 6% higher than the optimal mono-temporal (February, wintering period) result, and (2) the red-edge band and the shortwave-infrared band played an essential role in accurate garlic extraction. This study gives inspiration in selecting the remotely sensed data source, the band, and phenology for accurately extracting garlic planting area, which could be transferred to other sites with larger areas and similar agriculture structures.