Deep Learning-Based Framework for Soil Moisture Content Retrieval of Bare Soil from Satellite Data

Abstract

Machine learning (ML) is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that has been successfully applied in a variety of remote sensing applications, including geophysical information retrieval such as soil moisture content (SMC). Deep learning (DL) is a subfield of ML that uses models with complex structures to solve prediction problems with higher performance than traditional ML. In this study, a framework based on DL was developed for SMC retrieval. For this purpose, a sample dataset was built, which included synthetic aperture radar (SAR) backscattering, radar incidence angle, and ground truth data. Herein, the performance of five optimized ML prediction models was evaluated in terms of soil moisture prediction. However, to boost the prediction performance of these models, a DL-based data augmentation technique was implemented to create a reconstructed version of the available dataset. This includes building a sparse autoencoder DL network for data reconstruction. The Bayesian optimization strategy was employed for fine-tuning the hyperparameters of the ML models in order to improve their prediction performance. The results of our study highlighted the improved performance of the five ML prediction models with augmented data. The Gaussian process regression (GPR) showed the best prediction performance with 4.05% RMSE and 0.81 R2 on a 10% independent test subset.