Potential of Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Networks for Crop Classification with Multitemporal Remote Sensing Images

This study investigates the potential of bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) for efficient modeling of temporal information in crop classification using multitemporal remote sensing images. Unlike unidirectional LSTM models that consider only either forward or backward states, Bi-LSTM could account for temporal dependency of time-series images in both forward and backward directions. This property of Bi-LSTM can be effectively applied to crop classification when it is difficult to obtain full time-series images covering the entire growth cycle of crops. The classification performance of the Bi-LSTM is compared with that of two unidirectional LSTM architectures (forward and backward) with respect to different input image combinations via a case study of crop classification in Anbadegi, Korea. When full time-series images were used as inputs for classification, the Bi-LSTM outperformed the other unidirectional LSTM architectures; however, the difference in classification accuracy from unidirectional LSTM was not substantial. On the contrary, when using multitemporal images that did not include useful information for the discrimination of crops, the Bi-LSTM could compensate for the information deficiency by including temporal information from both forward and backward states, thereby achieving the best classification accuracy, compared with the unidirectional LSTM. These case study results indicate the efficiency of the Bi-LSTM for crop classification, particularly when limited input images are available.