Cognitive land cover mapping: A three-layer deep learning architecture for remote sensing data classification

Abstract

In many application domains, remotely sensed (RS) data are essential for disaster monitoring, climate forecasting, and remote surveillance. It perceives and gathers environmental, sociological, and transitional data on its own, from a distance, in increasing amounts of spatial and temporal details. While urbanization has been continued to be a worldwide phenomenon, the urban management and planning are needed to satisfy the needs of the Earth system. The operations associated with land management, urban planning, and transportation on Earth have been connected to digital maps and geographic databases. Knowledge of land cover is also significant for managing, conserving, and formulating environmental and urban development policies. Therefore, highly accurate Land Use Land Cover (LULC) assessment and monitoring are of the utmost significance for empirical studies and organizational accomplishment. In this study, we leverage remotely sensed data to formulate a sophisticated deep learning system for comprehensive Earth observation. The core of our approach involves the development of a three-layered Convolution-Convolution-Maxpooling Convolutional Neural Network (CCMCNN) model, preceded by a meticulous pre-processing stage. In the pre-processing stage, images extracted from the NWPU-RESISC dataset undergo resizing, division, and augmentation procedures before being fed into the three-layered CCMCNN architecture for the purpose of classifying them into five different LULC categories. The effectiveness of our proposed model undergoes thorough validation through a comparative examination against various pre-trained deep learning models outlined in existing literature. Presenting performance metrics, our model attains a remarkable accuracy rate of 98.4%. This advancement holds significant promise in the realm of Earth surveillance, offering a valuable tool for enhancing situational awareness and environmental monitoring.