Deep density estimation based on multi-spectral remote sensing data for in-field crop yield forecasting

Yield forecasting has been a central task in computational agriculture because of its impact on agricultural management from the individual farmer to the government level. With advances in remote sensing technology, computational processing power, and machine learning, the ability to forecast yield has improved substantially over the past years. However, most previous work has been done leveraging low-resolution satellite imagery and forecasting yield at the region, county, or occasionally farm-level. In this work, we use high-resolution aerial imagery and output from high-precision harvesters to predict in-field harvest values for corn-raising farms in the US Midwest. By using the harvester information, we are able to cast the problem of yield-forecasting as a density estimation problem and predict a harvest rate, in bushels/acre, at every pixel in the field image. This approach provides the farmer with a detailed view of which areas of the farm may be performing poorly so he can make the appropriate management decisions in addition to providing an improved prediction of total yield. We evaluate both traditional machine learning approaches with hand-crafted features alongside deep learning methods. We demonstrate the superiority of our pixel-level approach based on an encoder-decoder framework which produces a 5.41% MAPE at the field-level.