Multispectral Crop Yield Prediction Using 3D-Convolutional Neural Networks and Attention Convolutional LSTM Approaches

In recent years, national economies are highly affected by crop yield predictions. By early prediction, the market price can be predicted, importing, and exporting plan can be provided, social, and economic effects of waste products can be minimized, and a program can be presented for humanitarian food aid. In addition, agricultural fields are constantly growing to generate products required. The use of machine learning (ML) methods in this sector can lead to the efficient production and high-quality agricultural products. Traditional predictive machine models were unable to find nonlinear relationships between data. Recently, there has been a revolution in prediction systems via the advancement of ML, which can be used to achieve highly accurate decision-making networks. Thus far, many strategies have been used to evaluate agricultural products, such as DeepYield, CNN-LSTM, and ConvLSTM. However, preferable prediction accuracy is required. In this study, two architectures have been proposed. The first model includes 2D-CNN, skip connections, and LSTM-Attentions. The second model comprises 3D-CNN, skip connections, and ConvLSTM Attention. The Input data given from MODIS products such as Land-Cover, Surface-Temperature, and MODIS-Land-surface from 2003 to 2018 on the county level over 1800 counties, where soybean is mainly cultivated in the USA. The proposed methods have been compared with the most recent models. Then, the results showed that the second proposed method notably outperformed the other techniques. In case of MAE, the second proposed method, DeepYield, ConvLSTM, 3DCNN, and CNN-LSTM obtained 4.3, 6.003, 6.05, 6.3, and 7.002, respectively.