Spatio-Temporal Prediction of Vegetation Dynamics Based on Remote Sensing Data Using Deep Learning

Understanding and analyzing spatial-temporal data changes is very important in various applications, including the protection and development of natural resources. In the past studies, Markov process and comparison-based methods were mainly used to predict the changes of vegetation indices, whose accuracy still needs improvement. Although time series analysis has been used to predict some indices, the method to extract these indices from remote sensing data and model their sequences with deep learning is rarely observed. In this article, a method for predicting changes in plant indices based on deep learning is presented. The research data includes Landsat satellite images from 2000 to 2018, related to four seasons in the north and east of Shahrood city in Semnan province. The time span of the extracted images makes it possible to predict changes in vegetation cover. Vegetation indices extracted from the data set are NDVI, SAVI and RVI. After performing atmospheric corrections on the images, the desired indicators are extracted and then the data is converted into a time series. Finally, the modeling of the sequence of these data is performed by the Short-Long-Term Memory (LSTM) network. The results of the experiments show that the deep network is able to predict future values with high accuracy. The amount of the model error without additional data is 0.03 for the NDVI index, 0.02 for the SAVI index, and 0.06 for the RVI index.