The lack of reliable and up-to-date data in developing countries is a major obstacle to sustainable development. In Morocco, where groundwater withdrawals by farmers are very intensive and informal, maps describing and monitoring the extension of irrigated areas are scarce and labor-intensive to obtain. In this paper a novel transfer learning algorithm is proposed to map irrigated areas at different stages of an agricultural cycle from Landsat 8 images. The results obtained displays satisfactory performance over traditional machine learning algorithms. On a small dataset, we initially tested three well known deep learning architectures (SegNet, DenseNet and Unet). The results obtained were not satisfactory. So, to get high performance, we rely on a transfer learning architecture combining UNet with ResNet50 backbone (trained on 2012 ILSVRC ImageNet dataset) as a baseline after a phase where different configurations were tested. In the first part of this study, we compared the use of three optimization methods: Adam and two variants of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) associated with two techniques (Cyclical Learning Rate and Warm Restart) to find the optimal learning rate and then test the impact of data augmentation on the overall accuracies. Data augmentation had improved the overall accuracy for the three methods. Adam based method from 94% to 97% with mean IoU of 0,79 (for all land cover classes) and 0,86 for irrigated areas class. For SGD based methods, the overall accuracy had increased from 91% to 94% with mean IoU of 0,75 (for all land cover classes) and 0,82 for irrigated areas class. As we are interested in having irrigated areas maps at different key periods of the agricultural cycle, we also explored, in the second part of this study, the temporal generalization of the best model.

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