Under the intensifying impacts of climate change, tightening agricultural resource constraints, and escalating food security pressures, the development of high-accuracy and interpretable crop yield estimation methods has become a critical technical issue in sustainable agricultural engineering. In this study, multi-temporal and multi-spectral remote sensing imagery are utilized as the core input. A multi-scale visual feature extraction module is designed to characterize canopy texture, field structure, and regional heterogeneity, while a temporal growth modeling module captures the dynamic evolution of crops from emergence to maturity. Yield regression is further integrated with economic mapping and explainability mechanisms, thereby forming an end-to-end prediction framework. Experimental results across multiple regions and years demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms various representative models. In the primary regression experiment, the framework achieves approximately R2=0.76, with MAE reduced to 0.60 and MSE to 0.62, representing an error reduction of over 25% compared with traditional regression approaches and classical machine learning models. In classification experiments for yield-grade evaluation, the model attains an accuracy of approximately 0.85, with both precision and recall exceeding 0.82, demonstrating its effectiveness in both continuous yield prediction and stable yield-level region identification. Cross-region and cross-year validation further indicate strong generalization capability, with R2 remaining above 0.65 in unseen regions and around 0.67 under cross-year prediction settings. Ablation studies confirm the synergistic contributions of multi-scale spatial modeling, temporal growth modeling, and explainability constraints, as performance consistently declines when any individual module is removed. Overall, the results highlight that the proposed framework provides reliable data support for precision agricultural management, resource optimization, and agricultural engineering decision-making, while also offering a scalable and reproducible pathway for sustainable agricultural engineering development.
Tang et al. (Tue,) studied this question.