Comparison of land use classification based on convolutional neural network

Abstract

Deep learning methods have been developed and widely used in land use classification with remote sensing images. In addition, due to the different datasets used in different studies, there is a lack of direct comparison between different deep learning model applications in land use classification. The open source dataset DeepSat was used to build and test a convolutional neural network (CNN) model. The convolution kernels in the model were extracted to further study the specific features learned by the deep learning model. In addition, different CNN-based models were compared to explore the impacts of model structures on model accuracy. The major conclusions from the research are: (1) CNN model is effective in land use classification, with an accuracy of 0.9998 and 0.9991 for the SAT-4 and SAT-6 data, respectively; (2) CNN does have a “learning” ability that can extract the most critical and effective information from training datasets; and (3) for remote sensing land use classification, increasing the number of convolution kernels is better than adding more convolutional layers. Max pooling is better than average pooling. In addition, a localized response normalized layer can also improve model accuracy.