Green cover change detection using a modified adaptive ensemble of extreme learning machines for North-Western India

Abstract

Climate change is the biggest challenge faced by the world. It has already started affecting the weather patterns leading to disruption of normal life. Detecting change helps to monitor and plan the Earth’s resources in an efficient manner. An important factor in climate change is the change in the green cover. Non-availability of standard datasets and limited labeled data points makes it difficult to attain high accuracies in change detection. In this paper, we have proposed a modified ensemble of extreme learning machines (mAEELM) for change detection in green cover to increase the accuracy of the change detection process. It uses Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) as the base classifier. Different ELMs are trained with different configuration so that they have different learning capabilities. These ELMs are combined to create an ensemble and it is then adapted based on the accuracy of the individual ELMs. The ensemble is then pruned to eliminate the ELMs which are not contributing towards the overall result of the ensemble, to make it more efficient. The proposed algorithm has been applied for detecting change on two areas of Gandhuan, Punjab and Chaparkaura Kham, Uttar Pradesh, India. The algorithm shows an average accuracy of 97.8% on both the datasets.