TIME SERIES LAND COVER CLASSIFICATION BASED ON SEMI-SUPERVISED CONVOLUTIONAL LONG SHORT-TERM MEMORY NEURAL NETWORKS

Abstract. Time series imagery containing high-dimensional temporal features are conducive to improving classification accuracy. With the plenty accumulation of historical images, the inclusion of time series data becomes available to utilize, but it is difficult to avoid missing values caused by cloud cover. Meanwhile, seeking a large amount of training labels for long time series also makes data collection troublesome. In this study, we proposed a semi-supervised convolutional long short-term memory neural network (Semi-LSTM) in long time series which achieves an accurate and automated land cover classification with a small proportion of labels. Three main contributions of this work are summarized as follows: i) the proposed method achieve an excellent classification via a small group of labels in long time series data, and reducing dependence of training labels; ii) it is a robust algorithm in accuracy for the influence of noise, and reduces the requirements of sequential data for cloudless and lossless images; and iii) it makes full advantage of spectral-spatial-temporal features, especially expanding time context information to enhance classification accuracy. Finally, the proposed network is validated on time series imagery from Landsat 8. All quantitative analyses and evaluation indicators of the experimental results demonstrate competitive performance in the suggested modes.