An Hybrid Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network for Crop Type Recognition Based on Multitemporal Sar Image Sequences

Agriculture monitoring is a key task for producers, governments and decision makers. The analysis of multitemporal remote sensing data provides a cost-effective way to perform this task. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been successfully used in temporal modeling problems, while Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNS) are the state-of-the-art in image classification, mainly due to their ability to capture spatial context. In this work, we propose the use of a hybrid network architecture for crop mapping that combines RNNs and CNNs. We evaluate this architecture experimentally upon a Sentinel-1A database from a tropical region in Brazil. The ability of recurrent networks to model temporal context is compared with the conventional image stacking approach. The impact of using CNN learned features rather than context aware handcrafted features is also investigated. In our analysis the hybrid architecture achieved better average class accuracy than alternative approaches based on image stacking and GLCM features.