<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="/oai-pmh.xsl"?>
<OAI-PMH xmlns="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/ http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/OAI-PMH.xsd">
  <responseDate>2026-09-21T22:12:07Z</responseDate>
  <request identifier="oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/108732" metadataPrefix="etdms" verb="GetRecord">https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh</request>
  <GetRecord>
    <record>
      <header>
        <identifier>oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/108732</identifier>
        <datestamp>2023-07-11</datestamp>
        <setSpec>col_2142_5131</setSpec>
        <setSpec>col_2142_10761</setSpec>
        <setSpec>com_2142_5130</setSpec>
        <setSpec>com_2142_10755</setSpec>
        <setSpec>com_2142_234</setSpec>
      </header>
      <metadata>
        <thesis xmlns="http://www.ndltd.org/standards/metadata/etdms/1.1/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.ndltd.org/standards/metadata/etdms/1.1/ http://www.ndltd.org/standards/metadata/etdms/1.1/etdms11.xsd http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ http://www.ndltd.org/standards/metadata/etdms/1.1/etdmsdc.xsd">
          <dc:contributor>Peng, Jian</dc:contributor>
          <dc:creator>Huang, Yizhi</dc:creator>
          <dc:date>2020-10-07T22:50:09Z</dc:date>
          <dc:date>2020-10-07T22:50:09Z</dc:date>
          <dc:date>2022-10-07T22:50:13Z</dc:date>
          <dc:date>2020-07-23</dc:date>
          <dc:date>2020-08</dc:date>
          <dc:description>An effective real-time crop cover classification prediction is essential to real-time large-scale
crop monitoring. High resolution satellite optical data containing distinguishable signals of
different crop types have been used by recent crop cover classification studies. However,
existing works that merely use satellite information fail to reach a high accuracy, especially
in the early growing season (before July) because of lacking informative satellite scenes
that can be used to effectively distinguish crops. In this work, we present a deep-learning-
based method, named BlueBird, to accurately classify crop cover types in real-time at the
national scale. BlueBird consists of three sub-models: prior-knowledge model, real-time
optical model, and real-time weight model. Historical planting information, sequence of
planted crop types in past years, is incorporated into the prior-knowledge model to improve
the performance, especially in the pre and early season when satellite images do not contain
distinguishable crop signals. Available satellite optical data is used by the real-time optical
model to extract spatial and temporal information that can be used to classify the crops.
Finally, BlueBird integrates historical crop planting information with spatial and temporal
patterns discovered from satellite time series using a trainable real-time weight model that
evolves over time, thereby allowing the satellite-based model to be increasingly dominant as
more observation data are available. We also propose a national acreage model based on
BlueBird’s real-time prediction to predict the national acreage of two major crops, corn and
soybean. We conduct leave-one-year-out validations in the whole U.S. Corn Belt from 2014
to 2019 to evaluate the real-time performance of BlueBird. We generate F1 score maps thatcompare BlueBird’s predictions with CDL and scatter plots that compare BlueBird’s county-
level acreage with NASS’s ground truth to demonstrate the large-scale effectiveness. In the
map of June 1, we can see that corn belt counties where corn and soybean are dominant
crop types generally reach 0.8 F1 score. Same promising results can be concluded from
the scatter plot of June 1, that for both corn and soybean, most years reach a r 2 above
0.85. From the accuracy map and scatter plot on August 30 , we can see the significant
improvement from initial predictions to end-of-season predictions. In the detailed analysis
of Champaign, Illinois, BlueBird achieves F1 scores of 0.88 on June 1 for all the validation
years and end-of-season F1 scores above 0.95 for all years except 2019 when historic flooding
and precipitation happens. We use BlueBird’s prediction to evaluate our national acreage
model using the ground truth released by NASS. Error of Corn acreage has a RMSE of
2.12% on June 1 and a RMSE of 1.36% on August 30. Error of soybean acreage (2014 to2018) has a RMSE of 1.70% on June 1 and a RMSE of 0.85% on August 30. The extensive
results demonstrate that BlueBird is capable of generating highly accurate real-time crop
cover in national-scale and the national acreage model is effective in predicting corn and
soybean acreages.</dc:description>
          <dc:description>Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2022-08-01</dc:description>
          <dc:description>The student, Yizhi Huang, accepted the attached license on 2020-07-22 at 19:47.</dc:description>
          <dc:description>The student, Yizhi Huang, submitted this Thesis for approval on 2020-07-22 at 20:02.</dc:description>
          <dc:description>This Thesis was approved for publication on 2020-07-23 at 09:47.</dc:description>
          <dc:description>DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #15734 on 2020-10-02 at 15:52:21</dc:description>
          <dc:description>Made available in DSpace on 2020-10-07T22:50:09Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 3
HUANG-THESIS-2020.pdf: 5506608 bytes, checksum: 34e80d45dcab31901c1c3a663218b1c7 (MD5)
Thesis_yizhihuang.zip: 5420608 bytes, checksum: 202ecd243eca61a29574aab2a3615c76 (MD5)
LICENSE.txt: 4208 bytes, checksum: b2949a6c4dbbd2bebf75c8d33d105eab (MD5)
  Previous issue date: 2020-07-23</dc:description>
          <dc:description>Embargo set by: Seth Robbins for item 116361
Lift date: 2022-10-07T22:50:13Z
Reason: Author requested closed access (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD system</dc:description>
          <dc:description>Author requested closed access (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD system</dc:description>
          <dc:description>Limited</dc:description>
          <dc:format>application/pdf</dc:format>
          <dc:identifier>http://hdl.handle.net/2142/108732</dc:identifier>
          <dc:language>en</dc:language>
          <dc:rights>Copyright 2020 Yizhi Huang</dc:rights>
          <dc:subject>Crop Type</dc:subject>
          <dc:subject>Satellite Image</dc:subject>
          <dc:subject>Land Cover</dc:subject>
          <dc:subject>Real Time Crop Type Classification</dc:subject>
          <dc:subject>Real Time Land Cover Classification</dc:subject>
          <dc:title>BlueBird: national-scale real-time crop cover classification using multi-stage deep learning approach</dc:title>
          <dc:type>text</dc:type>
          <dc:type>Thesis</dc:type>
          <degree>
            <department>Computer Science</department>
            <discipline>Computer Science</discipline>
            <grantor>University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign</grantor>
            <level>Thesis</level>
            <name>M.S.</name>
          </degree>
        </thesis>
      </metadata>
    </record>
  </GetRecord>
</OAI-PMH>
