Bidirectional Recurrent Imputation and Abundance Estimation of LULC Classes With MODIS Multispectral Time-Series and Geo-Topographic and Climatic Data

Abstract

Remotely sensed data are dominated by mixed Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) types. Spectral unmixing (SU) is a key technique that disentangles mixed pixels into constituent LULC types and their abundance fractions. While existing studies on Deep Learning (DL) for SU typically focus on single time-step hyperspectral (HS) or multispectral (MS) data, our work pioneers SU using MODIS MS time series, addressing missing data with end-to-end DL models. Our approach enhances a Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM)-based model by incorporating geographic, topographic (geo-topographic), and climatic ancillary information. Notably, our method eliminates the need for explicit endmember extraction, instead learning the input-output relationship between mixed spectra and LULC abundances through supervised learning. Experimental results demonstrate that integrating spectral-temporal input data with geo-topographic and climatic information significantly improves the estimation of LULC abundances in mixed pixels. To facilitate this study, we curated a novel labeled dataset for Andalusia (Spain) with monthly MODIS multispectral time series at 460m resolution for 2013. Named Andalusia MultiSpectral MultiTemporal Unmixing (Andalusia-MSMTU), this dataset provides pixellevel annotations of LULC abundances along with ancillary information. The dataset 1 and code 2 are available to the public.