YieldNet: A Convolutional Neural Network for Simultaneous Corn and Soybean Yield Prediction Based on Remote Sensing Data

Large scale crop yield estimation is, in part, made possible due to the availability of remote sensing data allowing for the continuous monitoring of crops throughout its growth state. Having this information allows stakeholders the ability to make real-time decisions to maximize yield potential. Although various models exist that predict yield from remote sensing data, there currently does not exist an approach that can estimate yield for multiple crops simultaneously, and thus leads to more accurate predictions. A model that predicts yield of multiple crops and concurrently considers the interaction between multiple crop's yield. We propose a new model called YieldNet which utilizes a novel deep learning framework that uses transfer learning between corn and soybean yield predictions by sharing the weights of the backbone feature extractor. Additionally, to consider the multi-target response variable, we propose a new loss function. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed method accurately predicts yield from one to four months before the harvest, and is competitive to other state-of-the-art approaches.