Efficient land management and farming practices are critical to maintaining agricultural production, especially in Europe with limited arable land. It is very time consuming to rely on a manual field inspection of cultivated land to archive farm crops. But with the help of satellite monitoring data on the earth’s surface, it is a new vision to classify farmland based on deep learning. This article has studied the Sentinel 2 (S2) data, which are top-of-atmosphere (TOA) reflectance values at the processing level-1C (L1C) observed from some areas of Germany and France. Aiming at the problem that the interference of atmosphere and cloud coverage weakens the recognition accuracy of subsequent algorithms, a method of combining feature expansion and feature importance analysis is proposed to optimize the raw S2 data. Specifically, the new 13 spectral features are expanded based on the linear and nonlinear combination of the raw 13 spectral bands of S2. The random forest (RF) algorithm is used to score the importance of features, and the important features of each time series are selected to form a new dataset. Then, an end-to-end deep learning model has been used for training. The structure of the model is a two-layer unidirectional recurrent neural network with long short-term memory (LSTM) as the backbone. And two linear layers as the output, which form two decision-making heads, respectively, representing output classification probability and the stop decision. The results show that adding features and selecting features is beneficial for the model to improve classification accuracy and predict the classification without all of the input data. This end-to-end classification pattern with early prediction would support intelligent monitoring of farm crops with a great advantage to the implementation of various agricultural policies.

The fusion of multi-spectral and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images could retain the advantages of each data, hence benefiting accurate land cover classification. However, some current image fusion methods face the challenge of producing unexpected noise. To overcome the aforementioned problem, this paper proposes a novel fusion method based on weighted median filter and Gram–Schmidt transform. In the proposed method, Sentinel-2A images and GF-3 images are respectively subjected to different preprocessing processes. Since weighted median filter does not strongly blur edges while filtering, it is applied to Sentinel-2A images for reducing noise. The processed Sentinel images are then transformed by Gram–Schmidt with GF-3 images. Two popular methods, principal component analysis method and traditional Gram–Schmidt transform, are used as the comparison methods in the experiment. In addition, random forest, a powerful ensemble model, is adopted as the land cover classifier due to its fast training speed and excellent classification performance. The overall accuracy, Kappa coefficient and classification map of the random forest are used as the evaluation criteria of the fusion method. Experiments conducted on five datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in both objective metrics and visual impressions. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method can improve the overall accuracy by up to 5% compared to using the original Sentinel-2A and has the potential to improve the satellite-based land cover classification accuracy.

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification often faces the problem of multiclass imbalance, which is considered to be one of the major challenges in the field of remote sensing. In recent years, deep learning has been successfully applied to the HSI classification, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is one of the most representative of them. However, it is difficult to effectively improve the accuracy of minority classes under the problem of multiclass imbalance. In addition, ensemble learning has been successfully applied to solve multiclass imbalance, such as random forest (RF) This article proposes a novel enhanced-random-feature-subspace-based ensemble CNN algorithm for the multiclass imbalanced problem. The main idea is to perform random oversampling of training samples and multiple data enhancements based on random feature subspace, and then, construct an ensemble learning model combining random feature selection and CNN to the HSI classification. Experimental results on three public hyperspectral datasets show that the performance of the proposed method is better than the traditional CNN, RF, and deep learning ensemble methods.

With the continuous progress of computer deep learning technology, convolutional neural network (CNN), as a representative approach, provides a unique solution for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. However, the parameters of CNN cannot be well-tuned when the number of training samples is insufficient, resulting in unsatisfactory classification performance. To tackle the thorny problem, a deep ensemble CNN method based on sample expansion for HSI classification is studied in this article. In particular, spatial information is first extracted and fused with original spectral bands to help classifiers obtain discriminant spectral–spatial features. Then, we use the pixel-pair feature (PPF) to expand the number of training samples so that the parameters of CNN structure can be fully trained. In addition, deep ensemble CNN is employed in this article, enabling the trained model to obtain better generalization ability and more robust classification results. Ultimately, the proposed method is applied to classify four widely used hyperspectral datasets. Experimental results show that the studied approach yields higher classification accuracy than some CNN-based methods even under the condition of small-size training set.