Fine extraction of multi-crop planting area based on deep learning with Sentinel- 2 time-series data

Accurate and timely access to the spatial distribution of crops is crucial for sustainable agricultural development and food security. However, extracting multi-crop areas based on high-resolution time-series data and deep learning still faces challenges. Therefore, this study aims to provide an effective model for multi-crop classification using high-resolution remote sensing time-series data. We designed two deep learning models based on convolutional neural network-long short-term memory (CNN-LSTM) and bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM). The monthly synthetic time series of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) from Sentinel-2 data will be used as input features to extract the multi-crop planting area in Shandong province's northwestern, southwestern, and eastern regions. The results showed that deep learning models achieved higher accuracy compared to the random forest (RF) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) models, with CNN-LSTM achieving the highest overall accuracy of 96.48%. At the county level, the coefficients of determination (R²) for the CNN-LSTM model were 0.91 for wheat, 0.88 for maize, and 0.73 for spring cotton. This study demonstrates that the CNN-LSTM model combined with monthly synthetic time-series NDVI provides a feasible approach for accurately mapping high-resolution multi-crop planting areas and also contributes significantly to decision support and resource management in agricultural production.