CBTA: a CNN-BiGRU method with triple attention for winter wheat yield prediction

Timely and accurate prediction of winter wheat yield contributes to ensuring national food security. We propose a CNN- bidirectional gated recurrent unit method with triple attention for winter wheat yield prediction, named CBTA. This deep learning model uses convolutional neural networks to mine the spatial spectral information in hyperspectral remote sensing images. Furthermore, the bidirectional gated recurrent unit is used to adaptively learn the time dependence between the various stages of winter wheat growth. Data from Henan Province, China, is used in this study to train the model and also verify its prediction performance and stability. The results from our experiment show that our proposed model has an excellent effect on yield prediction in the county, with root-mean-square-error, mean absolute error, and R2 of 0.469 t/ha, 0.336 t/ha, and 0.827, respectively. Moreover, our findings suggested that the precision of our model using the data from sowing to heading-flowering stage was very close to that from sowing to ripening stage, which proves that the CBTA model can accurately predict the yield of winter wheat 1 to 2 months in advance.