Deep Learning Crop Classification Approach Based on Sparse Coding of Time Series of Satellite Data

Abstract

Crop classification maps based on high resolution remote sensing data are essential for supporting sustainable land management. The most challenging problems for their producing are collecting of ground based training and validation datasets, non-regular satellite data acquisition and cloudiness. To increase the efficiency of ground data utilization it is important to develop classifiers able to be trained on the data collected in the previous year. In this study, we propose new deep learning method for providing crop classification maps using in-situ data that has been collected in the previous year. Main idea of the study is to utilize deep learning approach based on sparse autoencoder. At the first stage it is trained on satellite data only and then neural network fine-tuning is conducted based on in-situ data form the previous year. Taking into account that collecting ground truth data is very time consuming and challenging task, the proposed approach allows us to avoid necessity for annual collecting in-situ data for the same territory. Experimental results for the territory of Ukraine show that this technique is rather efficient and provides reliable crop classification maps with overall accuracy higher than 85.9%.