Farmland Extent and Visible Boundary Mapping from 1 m NAIP Imagery Using Residual U-Net and Text-Prompted SAM 3 Refinement

Abstract:Agricultural field maps are often proprietary, incomplete, or outdated, yet they provide the spatial framework for crop monitoring, production accounting, and land-conversion analysis. This study presents a reproducible workflow for mapping farmland extent and visible boundaries from 1 m NAIP RGB imagery. Thirty-seven scenes spanning open cropland, peri-urban interfaces, semi-arid irrigation geometries, and fragmented mosaics were annotated in CVAT and converted to binary masks. Non-overlapping 256 x 256 patches yielded 5,698 samples, split by source scene into 3,850 training, 770 validation, and 1,078 test patches. A residual U-Net (ResUNet) trained with a Dice-dominant loss, L = 2.5(1 - Dice) + BCE, achieved test accuracy 0.8808, IoU 0.8605, Dice 0.9234, precision 0.8766, and recall 0.9794. A frozen SAM 3 branch prompted with "agricultural farmland field" was fused with ResUNet by logical OR. On selected difficult patches, Dice improved from 0.858 to 0.955 (orchard rows) and from 0.804 to 0.903 (fragmented parcels). Sliding-window stitching produced coherent regional masks (example tile Dice 0.898 and 0.919). The product is a semantic farmland-extent layer, not a cadastral parcel map, and supports agricultural monitoring where current field layers are unavailable.

12 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables. Preprint submitted to Taylor & Francis. Code: this https URL Dataset: this https URL

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Image and Video Processing (eess.IV)

I.4.6; I.4.8; I.2.10; I.5.1

arXiv:2607.21881 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2607.21881v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.21881 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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