Field-scale soil moisture estimated from Sentinel-1 SAR data using a knowledge-guided deep learning approach

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Yu, Yi, Filippi, Patrick, Bishop, Thomas F. A.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Yu, Yi
Filippi, Patrick
Bishop, Thomas F. A.
author_facet Yu, Yi
Filippi, Patrick
Bishop, Thomas F. A.
contents Soil moisture (SM) estimation from active microwave data remains challenging due to the complex interactions between radar backscatter and surface characteristics. While the water cloud model (WCM) provides a semi-physical approach for understanding these interactions, its empirical component often limits performance across diverse agricultural landscapes. This research presents preliminary efforts for developing a knowledge-guided deep learning approach, which integrates WCM principles into a long short-term memory (LSTM) model, to estimate field SM using Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. Our proposed approach leverages LSTM's capacity to capture spatiotemporal dependencies while maintaining physical consistency through a modified dual-component loss function, including a WCM-based semi-physical component and a boundary condition regularisation. The proposed approach is built upon the soil backscatter coefficients isolated from the total backscatter, together with Landsat-resolution vegetation information and surface characteristics. A four-fold spatial cross-validation was performed against in-situ SM data to assess the model performance. Results showed the proposed approach reduced SM retrieval uncertainties by 0.02 m$^3$/m$^3$ and achieved correlation coefficients (R) of up to 0.64 in areas with varying vegetation cover and surface conditions, demonstrating the potential to address the over-simplification in WCM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_00265
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Field-scale soil moisture estimated from Sentinel-1 SAR data using a knowledge-guided deep learning approach
Yu, Yi
Filippi, Patrick
Bishop, Thomas F. A.
Machine Learning
Image and Video Processing
Soil moisture (SM) estimation from active microwave data remains challenging due to the complex interactions between radar backscatter and surface characteristics. While the water cloud model (WCM) provides a semi-physical approach for understanding these interactions, its empirical component often limits performance across diverse agricultural landscapes. This research presents preliminary efforts for developing a knowledge-guided deep learning approach, which integrates WCM principles into a long short-term memory (LSTM) model, to estimate field SM using Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. Our proposed approach leverages LSTM's capacity to capture spatiotemporal dependencies while maintaining physical consistency through a modified dual-component loss function, including a WCM-based semi-physical component and a boundary condition regularisation. The proposed approach is built upon the soil backscatter coefficients isolated from the total backscatter, together with Landsat-resolution vegetation information and surface characteristics. A four-fold spatial cross-validation was performed against in-situ SM data to assess the model performance. Results showed the proposed approach reduced SM retrieval uncertainties by 0.02 m$^3$/m$^3$ and achieved correlation coefficients (R) of up to 0.64 in areas with varying vegetation cover and surface conditions, demonstrating the potential to address the over-simplification in WCM.
title Field-scale soil moisture estimated from Sentinel-1 SAR data using a knowledge-guided deep learning approach
topic Machine Learning
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00265