Sparse Pixel Training of Convolutional Neural Networks for Land Cover Classification

Abstract

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have become the core of modern machine learning approaches. In addition to its inspiring interior design idea, the success of CNN depends mainly on two factors, the first is the availability of training data and the second is the computing power of the used devices. In the field of remote sensing, data availability is difficult and expensive. Furthermore, processing large remote sensing data to accommodate different models is a laborious process. At the same time, training data is often collected in the form of points distributed over crop fields rather than regions, which results in the scarcity of training data. To specifically address the scarcity of training points, in this paper we present a sparse pixel-based training of U-Net convolutional neural networks for land cover classification. Training images are reconstructed from the points’ collection in a random manner, they are used as an input for the convolution networks. Based on this proposed method, the amount of training data is reproduced from the different spectral signals for each land cover. We conducted extensive experiments on eight classes, using ground truth data collected from several locations in Fayoum Governorate, Egypt. The obtained results showed the superiority of the proposed method over other methods.