Snow Parameters Inversion from Passive Microwave Remote Sensing Measurements by Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

This paper proposes a novel inverse method based on the deep convolutional neural network (ConvNet) to extract snow’s layer thickness and temperature via passive microwave remote sensing (PMRS). The proposed ConvNet is trained using simulated data obtained through conventional computational electromagnetic methods. Compared with the traditional inverse method, the trained ConvNet can predict the result with higher accuracy. Besides, the proposed method has a strong tolerance for noise. The proposed ConvNet composes three pairs of convolutional and activation layers with one additional fully connected layer to realize regression, i.e., the inversion of snow parameters. The feasibility of the proposed method in learning the inversion of snow parameters is validated by numerical examples. The inversion results indicate that the correlation coefficient (R²) ratio between the proposed ConvNet and conventional methods reaches 4.8, while the ratio for the root mean square error (RMSE) is only 0.18. Hence, the proposed method experiments with a novel path to improve the inversion of passive microwave remote sensing through deep learning approaches.