Deep Recurrent Neural Networks for mapping winter vegetation quality coverage via multi-temporal SAR Sentinel-1

Mapping winter vegetation quality coverage is a challenge problem of remote sensing. This is due to the cloud coverage in winter period, leading to use radar rather than optical images. The objective of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the capabilities of radar Sentinel-1 and deep learning concerning about mapping winter vegetation quality coverage. The analysis presented in this paper is carried out on multi-temporal Sentinel-1 data over the site of La Rochelle, France, during the campaign in December 2016. This dataset were processed in order to produce an intensity radar data stack from October 2016 to February 2017. Two deep Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based classifier methods were employed. We found that the results of RNNs clearly outperformed the classical machine learning approaches (Support Vector Machine and Random Forest). This study confirms that the time series radar Sentinel-1 and RNNs could be exploited for winter vegetation quality cover mapping.