Crop Classification with Attention Based BI-LSTM and Temporal Convolution Neural Network Combination for Remote Sensing Breizhcrop Time Series Data

Abstract

In the modern era, remote sensing data has become increasingly useful for determining land use and coverage requirements. Remote sensing data can be used for a variety of purposes, including the classification of crops. It is possible to aggregate remote sensing data for a specific area over time in order to obtain a more complete picture based on the time series of this data. One example of these types of data is the Breizhcrop dataset, which was collected using satellite images acquired by Sentinel 2 over a period of time. This study aims to investigate a neural network based on attention mechanisms using the BI-LSTM layer in conjunction with Temporal-CNN for the classification of crops. The aim of the research is to find a model for corps classification in image-based time series. In line with this goal, in addition to finding features over time, the presented model also needs to produce high-accuracy features at each time step to increase classification. Utilizing the designed neural network, we seek to find local features with the attention mechanism and general features with a second layer. This neural network was validated on the BreizhCrop dataset and we conclude that it performs better than alternative approaches. The proposed method has been compared with Temporal CNN, Star RNN, and Vanilla LSTM networks and it has obtained better results than the mentioned neural networks. Taking advantage of these local and global features that extract with developed model obtained a high accuracy rate of 82%.