AgroShadow: A New Sentinel-2 Cloud Shadow Detection Tool for Precision Agriculture

Remote sensing for precision agriculture has been strongly fostered by the launches of the European Space Agency Sentinel-2 optical imaging constellation, enabling both academic and private services for redirecting farmers towards a more productive and sustainable management of the agroecosystems. As well as the freely and open access policy adopted by the European Space Agency (ESA), software and tools are also available for data processing and deeper analysis. Nowadays, a bottleneck in this valuable chain is represented by the difficulty in shadow identification of Sentinel-2 data that, for precision agriculture applications, results in a tedious problem. To overcome the issue, we present a simplified tool, AgroShadow, to gain full advantage from Sentinel-2 products and solve the trade-off between omission errors of Sen2Cor (the algorithm used by the ESA) and commission errors of MAJA (the algorithm used by Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales/Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, CNES/DLR). AgroShadow was tested and compared against Sen2Cor and MAJA in 33 Sentinel 2A-B scenes, covering the whole of 2020 and in 18 different scenarios of the whole Italian country at farming scale. AgroShadow returned the lowest error and the highest accuracy and F-score, while precision, recall, specificity, and false positive rates were always similar to the best scores which alternately were returned by Sen2Cor or MAJA.