Accurate crop type identification and crop area estimation from remote sensing data in tropical regions are still considered challenging tasks. The more favorable weather conditions, in comparison to the characteristic conditions of temperate regions, permit higher flexibility in land use, planning, and management, which implies complex crop dynamics. Moreover, the frequent cloud cover prevents the use of optical data during large periods of the year, making SAR data an attractive alternative for crop mapping in tropical regions. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of Deep Learning (DL) techniques for crop recognition from multi-date SAR images from tropical regions. Three DL strategies are investigated: autoencoders, convolutional neural networks, and fully-convolutional networks. The paper further proposes a post-classification technique to enforce prior knowledge about crop dynamics in the target area. Experiments conducted on a Sentinel-1 multitemporal sequence of a tropical region in Brazil reveal the pros and cons of the tested methods. In our experiments, the proposed crop dynamics model was able to correct up to 16.5% of classification errors and managed to improve the performance up to 3.2% and 8.7% in terms of overall accuracy and average F1-score, respectively.
Abstract. Although very efficient in a number of application fields, deep learning based models are known to demand large amounts of labeled data for training. Particularly for remote sensing applications, responding to that demand is generally expensive and time consuming. Moreover, supervised training methods tend to perform poorly when they are tested with a set of samples that does not match the general characteristics of the training set. Domain adaptation methods can be used to mitigate those problems, especially in applications where labeled data is only available for a particular region or epoch, i.e., for a source domain, but not for a target domain on which the model should be tested. In this work we introduce a domain adaptation approach based on representation matching for the deforestation detection task. The approach follows the Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation (ADDA) framework, and we introduce a margin-based regularization constraint in the learning process that promotes a better convergence of the model parameters during training. The approach is evaluated using three different domains, which represent sites in different forest biomes. The experimental results show that the approach is successful in the adaptation of most of the domain combination scenarios, usually with considerable gains in relation to the baselines.
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