Fields of the Planet: Field Boundary Mapping Beyond 10m
Abstract
Field-boundary accuracy depends on the model, sensor resolution, label discretization, and evaluation procedure. Measuring the contribution of sensor resolution therefore requires a controlled comparison across sensors. We present Fields of the Planet (FTP), a 3 m PlanetScope companion to Fields of The World (FTW) containing 133,168 co-registered patch-window targets across 24 countries. FTP preserves FTW's vector polygons, seasonal windows, and dataset splits, enabling direct comparison with 10 m Sentinel-2. We first quantify the resolution ceiling by rasterizing and vectorizing the same ground-truth parcels at each resolution to determine which fields the label grid can represent. We evaluate predicted parcels with polygon-level and boundary metrics. With identical PRUE+ training and post-processing across sensors, plus an upsampled Sentinel-2 control, we isolate gains from image content. PlanetScope raises panoptic quality (PQ) from 21.0 to 35.5, improves PQ on sub-$0.5$ ha fields from 5.8 to 15.7, and reduces matched-boundary error from 18.6 m to 7.4 m. Pixel-level metrics understate this improvement, so field-boundary benchmarks should account for sensor resolution.
