A Decade of Wheat Mapping for Lebanon

Wheat accounts for approximately 20% of the world's caloric intake, making it a vital component of global food security. Given this importance, mapping wheat fields plays a crucial role in enabling various stakeholders, including policy makers, researchers, and agricultural organizations, to make informed decisions regarding food security, supply chain management, and resource allocation. In this paper, we tackle the problem of accurately mapping wheat fields out of satellite images by introducing an improved pipeline for winter wheat segmentation, as well as presenting a case study on a decade-long analysis of wheat mapping in Lebanon. We integrate a Temporal Spatial Vision Transformer (TSViT) with Parameter-Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT) and a novel post-processing pipeline based on the Fields of The World (FTW) framework. Our proposed pipeline addresses key challenges encountered in existing approaches, such as the clustering of small agricultural parcels in a single large field. By merging wheat segmentation with precise field boundary extraction, our method produces geometrically coherent and semantically rich maps that enable us to perform in-depth analysis such as tracking crop rotation pattern over years. Extensive evaluations demonstrate improved boundary delineation and field-level precision, establishing the potential of the proposed framework in operational agricultural monitoring and historical trend analysis. By allowing for accurate mapping of wheat fields, this work lays the foundation for a range of critical studies and future advances, including crop monitoring and yield estimation.

Quantum Meets SAR: A Novel Range-Doppler Algorithm for Next-Gen Earth Observation

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data processing is crucial for high-resolution Earth observation and remote sensing applications, one of the most commonly used algorithms for this task is the Range Doppler Algorithm (RDA). Using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), the collected signal is transformed to the frequency domain and then goes through the processing steps of this algorithm. However, when it comes to large datasets, this process can be computationally expensive. This paper explores the implementation of a Quantum Range Doppler Algorithm (QRDA), relying on the Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT) as a speedup tool over the classical FFT. Additionally, it proposes a quantum version of the Range Cell Migration Correction (RCMC) in the Fourier domain, one of the key correctional steps of the RDA algorithm, and compares it with its classical counterpart.