Image Classification Research Articles

Efficient image classification through collaborative knowledge distillation: A novel AlexNet modification approach

This paper introduces an innovative image classification technique utilizing knowledge distillation, tailored for a lightweight model structure. The core of the approach is a modified version of the AlexNet architecture, enhanced with depthwise-separable convolution layers. A unique aspect of this work is the Teacher-Student Collaborative Knowledge Distillation (TSKD) method. Unlike conventional knowledge distillation techniques, TSKD employs a dual-layered learning strategy, where the student model learns from both the final output and the intermediate layers of the teacher model. This collaborative learning approach enables the student model to actively engage in the learning process, resulting in more efficient knowledge transfer. The paper emphasizes the model suitability for scenarios with limited computational resources. This is achieved through architectural optimizations and the introduction of specialized loss functions, which balance the trade-off between model complexity and computational efficiency. The study demonstrates that despite its lightweight nature, the model maintains high accuracy and robustness in image classification tasks. Key contributions of the paper include the innovative use of depthwise-separable convolution in AlexNet, the TSKD approach for enhanced knowledge transfer, and the development of unique loss functions. These advancements collectively contribute to the model effectiveness in environments with computational constraints, making it a valuable contribution to the field of image classification.

Incremental-based YoloV3 model with Hyper-parameter Optimization for Product Image Classification in E-commerce Sector

Over the past few years, the E-commerce industry has grown tremendously for selling products to consumers. Here, the consumer can easily purchase the products from their residing seats and gets the products at the door step. Also, the image quality is suggested and also the image classification is intruded to meet the consumer prerequisite. Most of the image classification models are developed by machine learning approaches to improve the reliability, scalability, and accuracy level. Due to the heterogeneous nature of images, it restricts the features and lengthy dimensions for datasets which it degrades the performance whereas the classification of products becomes a cumbersome situation. In order to resolve the problem raised by existing methods, a novel product image classification model is proposed for the fashion E-commerce sector. The prime aspect of the proposed model is to build an effective E-commerce sector for a layman, where every individual can purchase the products appropriately. Initially, the dataset is constructed with diverse product images that are obtained from different E-commerce fields with various classes. Consequently, a novel Incremental-based Improved YoloV3 with Hyper-parameter Optimization (II-Yolov3-HO) model is introduced to enhance the classification performance. In the proposed model, some of the hyper parameters like convolution and pooling layers are replaced with the Visual Geometry Group16 (VGG16) model, the remaining convolutional layers are enhanced by the atrous convolution operation, and pooling layers are modified with Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP). In entire architecture, the weight factor is optimized using Predator-based Squirrel Search Algorithm (PDP-SSA) algorithm. Thus, the new E-commerce sector becomes free to categorize the products, and if it deals with a new product, it is declared as unknown data, which is then trained again in the proposed model. Hence, the concept of classification score matching with the threshold value is accomplished to deal the untrained product and the training weight is updated optimally using the proposed PDP-SSA. Finally, the enhanced model is compared over the state-of-the-art classification, provides the expected result for significantly classifying the multiple classes of products. The developed PDP-SSA-II-YoloV3-HO model is also able to perform recommendations in E-commerce sites even when the input is given as images other than text for searching the items. These uploaded images are analyzed in the developed II-Yolov3-HO model for providing the relevant items to the customer based on their features. The developed PDP-SSA-II-YoloV3-HO model achieves 99.46% regarding accuracy. Throughout the validation, the developed model outperforms enhanced and reliable performance than the existing approaches.

MobileDenseNeXt: Investigations on biomedical image classification

Background and objectiveWe are living in the information era. Therefore, intelligence-based researchers are hot-topic such as artificial intelligence. In the artificial intelligence research area, machine learning and deep learning models have frequently used to create intelligence assistants and deep learning is the shining star of the AI. Specifically, in the computer vision, numerous deep learning models have been proposed, leading to a competition between transformers and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Since the introduction of Vision Transformers (ViT), many transformer models have been advocated for computer vision, often overshadowing CNNs. Therefore, it is crucial to propose CNNs to showcase their prowess in image classification. This research introduces a lightweight CNN named MobileDenseNeXt. Materials and methodsThe proposed MobileDenseNeXt comprises four main blocks: (i) input, (ii) main, (iii) average pooling-based downsampling, and (iv) output. This research also incorporates convolution-based residual blocks and uses a depth concatenation layer to increase the number of filters. For downsampling, an average pooling operation has been employed, similar to the original DenseNet. Furthermore, the swish activation function is utilized in the presented CNN. MobileDenseNeXt has approximately 1.4 million learnable parameters, categorizing it as a lightweight CNN model. Additionally, a deep feature engineering approach has been developed using MobileDenseNeXt, incorporating two feature extractors with global average pooling and dropout layers, along with 10 feature selectors, to demonstrate the transfer learning capabilities of MobileDenseNeXt. ResultsThe recommended models achieved over 95% test classification accuracy on the used three datasets, unequivocally demonstrating the high image classification proficiency of the proposed MobileDenseNeXt. Moreover, to show general classification ability of the proposed model, MobileDenseNeXt was trained on the CIFAR10 dataset and reached 98.62% accuracy. ConclusionsThis research not only highlights the efficiency and effectiveness of MobileDenseNeXt in biomedical image classification but also highlights the competitive potential of this model for computer vision.

Discriminative atoms embedding relation dual network for classification of choroidal neovascularization in OCT images

Choroidal neovascularization (CNV) is an eye disease that can cause vision loss. Automatic CNV classification in OCT images is crucial in the treatment of CNV. However, two problems arise for CNV classification in OCT images. The subtle visual differences between different CNV types render classification difficult. Additionally, it’s difficult to obtain sufficient labeled data, which results in performance degradation. In order to solve these two problems, a discriminative atom-embedding relation dual network is proposed in this paper. Considering that semi-supervised learning (SSL) is an effective machine learning framework to make full use of limited labeled data and a large amount of unlabeled data, the proposed network is developed within an SSL framework. To capture the visual differences, novel discriminative atoms are first introduced to mine discriminative information between different CNV types. Subsequently, a relation module is incorporated to embed the learned discriminative atom information into the features. This makes the learned features capable of distinguishing between different CNV types. Moreover, a novel relation consistency loss is proposed to further improve the robustness of the learned features. Experimental results on private and public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Distributional loss for convolutional neural network regression and application to parameter estimation in satellite navigation signals

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) have been widely used in image classification. Over the years, they have also benefited from various enhancements and they are now considered state-of-the-art techniques for image-like data. However, when they are used for regression to estimate some function value from images, few recommendations are available to construct robust CNN regressor models. In this study, a robustness enforcing mechanism is proposed for CNN regression models. It combines convolutional neural layers to extract high level features representations from images with a soft labelling technique that helps generalization performance. More specifically, as the deep regression task is challenging, the idea is to account for some uncertainty in the targets that are seen as distributions around their mean. Building from earlier work (Imani and White, 2018), a specific histogram loss function based on the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is applied during training. The prior distributions are selected according to the physical characteristics of the parameters to estimate. To assess and illustrate the technique, the model is applied to Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) multipath estimation where multipath signal parameters have to be estimated from correlator output images from the I and Q channels. The multipath signal delay, magnitude, Doppler shift frequency and phase parameters are estimated from synthetically generated datasets of satellite signals. Experiments are conducted under various receiving conditions and various input images resolutions to test the estimation performances quality and robustness. The results show that the proposed soft labelling CNN technique using distributional loss outperforms classical CNN regression under all conditions. Furthermore, the extra learning performance achieved by the model allows the reduction of input image resolution from 80x80 down to 40x40 or sometimes 20x20.

An attention mechanism network based on the winner-take-all

In the field of neurology, neurons compete for brain attention in winner-take-all (WTA) competitions. Inspired by this, we propose a new WTA-based attention network (called ANW), which can be extended to general neural networks. The ANW network simulates WTA behavior in biological neurons; that is, the winner neuron itself becomes excited and sends its own spike signal. Furthermore, the winner will output an inhibition signal, which will be input into the cell synapses of other neurons. The ANW network regards the update of neuron weights after backpropagation as a stimulus input to neurons. Combined with the WTA function, the neural network will continue to update until it reaches a stable state. In this way, the ANW network can find the most active neurons in the network and generate the winners among these neurons to improve the ability of the neural network to extract features. As the ANW is a small and universal network, it can be seamlessly inserted into any neural network architecture, with negligible overhead, and can be trained together with a basic CNN. We verified the neural network with ANW by using the ImageNet-100, CIFAR-100 and MS COCO detection datasets for the experiments. The experimental results show that, compared with those of the baseline network, the top-1 err gains of 0.63% and 3.85% can be achieved for ANW, with classical ResNet-50 as the backbone network, respectively, demonstrating that the method can improve the performance of the model in image classification and target detection with wide applicability. The proposed method provides an effective, and almost consumption-neutral solution, for performance improvement in the field of computer vision target detection.

TGGS network: A multi-task learning network for gradient-guided knowledge sharing

Multi-task learning (MTL) has been widely used in various fields, such as time series data prediction and image classification. Most existing deep MTL methods achieve joint learning by sharing common knowledge with task relevance. However, they rely solely on self-exploration to mine common knowledge across the tasks, which is unguided and purposeless. Unlike these methods, in this paper, we propose a novel Task Gradient Guided Sharing (TGGS) MTL network for purposefully guiding the model to share knowledge. Specifically, we define a confidence matrix for each task for selecting effective knowledge from the common knowledge to share. To realize an effective guidance, we align the confidence matrix with a class gradient mapping (CGM) computed based on the task-specific gradients. Consequently, our method effectively employs task-specific gradients to guide the model in sharing useful knowledge. More importantly, the confidence matrix explains the complex correlations among tasks in MTL. As our method exclusively focuses on guided knowledge sharing, the TGGS network can seamlessly integrate with diverse MTL sharing strategies. We conduct extensive experiments on time series datasets and image datasets. The experimental results demonstrate our method significantly improves the performance of these MTL strategies.

Multiple Contrastive Experts for long-tailed image classification

Real-world image classification data usually exhibits a challenging long-tailed distribution, attributed to the inherent difficulty in data collection. Existing ensemble approaches predominantly prioritize the empirical diversification of the ensemble model, sidelining its critical aspects of representation ability. A noticeable gap also exists in theoretical analysis elucidating the intricate relationship between ensemble model diversity and its generalization efficacy. This paper introduces a loosely coupled ensemble framework, Multiple Contrastive Experts (MCE) tailored for long-tailed image classification, aiming to bolster image representation while ensuring diversity within the proposed MCE. Leveraging skill-diverse classification losses, the experts in the ensemble model are able to specialize in different kinds of classes in the long-tailed distribution. An adapted supervised contrastive learning (SCL) loss is introduced to guide training for each feature learning branch to enhance the representation ability of MCE. Through the effective integration of the different losses from all experts, each expert model can be optimized coordinately. Moreover, the relationship between the generalization ability of MCE and its diversity is theoretically revealed against a single classification model. At last, extensive experiments were made over five widely used long-tailed image classification datasets. The results show that our proposed MCE is very competitive performance against the state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining a relatively lower computational cost. Besides, MCE has also exhibited superior performance with the increasing number of experts.

A customised vision transformer for accurate detection and classification of Java Plum leaf disease

Vision Transformer (ViT) has recently attracted significant attention for its performance in image classification. However, studies have yet to explore its potential in detecting and classifying plant leaf disease. Most existing research on diseased plant leaf detection has focused on non-transformer convolutional neural networks (CNN). Moreover, the studies that applied ViT narrowly experimented using hyperparameters such as image size, patch size, learning rate, attention head, epoch, and batch size. However, these hyperparameters significantly contribute to the model performance. Recognising the gap, this study applied ViT to Java Plum disease detection using optimised hyperparameters. To harness the performance of ViT, this study presents an experiment on Java Plum leaf disease detection. Java Plum leaf diseases significantly threaten agricultural productivity by negatively impacting yield and quality. Timely detection and diagnosis are essential for successful crop management. The primary dataset collected in Bangladesh includes six classes, ‘Bacterial Spot’, ‘Brown Blight’, ‘Powdery Mildew’, and ‘Sooty Mold’, ‘healthy’, and ‘dry’. This experiment contributes to a thorough understanding of Java Plum leaf diseases. Following rigorous testing and refinement, our model demonstrated a significant accuracy rate of 97.51%. This achievement demonstrates the possibilities of using deep-learning tools in agriculture and inspires further research and application in this field. Our research offers a foundational model to ensure crop quality by precise detection, instilling confidence in the global Java Plum market.

FSNet: A dual-domain network for few-shot image classification

Few-shot learning is a challenging task, that aims to learn and identify novel classes from a limited number of unseen labeled samples. Previous work has focused primarily on extracting features solely in the spatial domain of images. However, the compressed representation in the frequency domain which contains rich pattern information is a powerful tool in the field of signal processing. Combining the frequency and spatial domains to obtain richer information can effectively alleviate the overfitting problem. In this paper, we propose a dual-domain combined model called Frequency Space Net (FSNet), which preprocesses input images simultaneously in both the spatial and frequency domains, extracts spatial and frequency information through two feature extractors, and fuses them to a composite feature for image classification tasks. We start from a different view of frequency analysis, linking conventional average pooling to Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT). We generalize the compression of the attention mechanism in the frequency domain. Consequently, we propose a novel Frequency Channel Spatial (FCS) attention mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that frequency and spatial information are complementary in few-shot image classification, improving the performance of the model. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on miniImageNet and CUB.

Benthic Habitat Mapping for Estimating Seagrass Carbon Stock Across Takabonerate Islands, Indonesia

Data on benthic habitat cover are essential for monitoring and managing coastal areas, providing valuable ecosystem services for local communities. Moreover, seagrass extent is crucial for estimating carbon stock using Tier-1 calculations. On the other side, remote sensing technology has proven effective in mapping benthic habitat cover, including seagrass, over large local areas. Therefore, this research aims to map specific benthic habitats in a local area to obtain high-accuracy estimates of seagrass extent for carbon stock estimation. The study was conducted in the Takabonerate Islands, Indonesia, using Sentinel-2A imagery. The study involved field data processing, which enabled the mapping of eight benthic habitat classes using Sentinel-2A images, along with the steps for Sentinel-2A image processing for benthic habitat mapping. The benthic habitat map was produced following image correction steps, including atmospheric, sunglint, and water column corrections, followed by image classification using a Neural Net Classifier (NNC). Seagrass carbon stock estimation was performed using the Tier-1 equation from IPCC 2013. The study revealed a total benthic habitat area of 57,538.04 hectares, with a seagrass area of 3,127.42 hectares for carbon stock estimation. The potential seagrass carbon stock in the study area was estimated to range from 337.76 GgC/ha to 31.27 GgC/ha using the Tier-1 equation. The overall accuracy of the benthic habitat map was 80.5%, calculated using a confusion matrix table. The spatial information from this study can be used by local coastal managers and governments for baseline and monitoring purposes. The key interpretations from this study provide valuable findings that can be adapted and improved for future local mapping purposes.

Landsat images and GIS techniques as key tools for historical analysis of landscape change and fragmentation

Monitoring and evaluation of landscape fragmentation is important in numerous research areas, such as natural resource protection and management, sustainable development, and climate change. One of the main challenges in image classification is the intricate selection of parameters, as the optimal combination significantly affects the accuracy and reliability of the final results. This research aimed to analyze landscape change and fragmentation in northwestern Peru. We utilized accurate land cover and land use (LULC) maps derived from Landsat imagery using Google Earth Engine (GEE) and ArcGIS software. For this, we identified the best dataset based on its highest overall accuracy, and kappa index; then we performed an analysis of variance (ANOVA) to assess the differences in accuracies among the datasets, finally, we obtained the LULC and fragmentation maps and analyzed them. We generated 31 datasets resulting from the combination of spectral bands, indices of vegetation, water, soil and clusters. Our analysis revealed that dataset 19, incorporating spectral bands along with water and soil indices, emerged as the optimal choice. Regarding the number of trees utilized in classification, we determined that using between 10 and 400 decision trees in Random Forest classification doesn't significantly affect overall accuracy or the Kappa index, but we observed a slight cumulative increase in accuracy metrics when using 100 decision trees. Additionally, between 1989 and 2023, the categories Artificial surfaces, Agricultural areas, and Scrub/ Herbaceous vegetation exhibit a positive rate of change, while the categories Forest and Open spaces with little or no vegetation display a decreasing trend. Consequently, the areas of patches and perforated have expanded in terms of area units, contributing to a reduction in forested areas (Core 3) due to fragmentation. As a result, forested areas smaller than 500 acres (Core 1 and 2) have increased. Finally, our research provides a methodological framework for image classification and assessment of landscape change and fragmentation, crucial information for decision makers in a current agricultural zone of northwestern Peru.

Advancing the automated foraminifera fossil identification through scanning electron microscopy image classification: A convolutional neural network approach

Abstract Handling more than thousand fossil foraminifera data is very challenging, especially for old-way identification. Determining morpho-taxonomy by conventional microscopic observation is very time-consuming and can lead to innacuracy identification. We are certain that the process could be advanced through big data analysis using a machine learning approach. Foraminifera fossils have already become a common standard for biostratigraphic proxies and paleoenvironmental interpretation. Therefore, the objective of this study was to develop an automated identification method using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). We used standardized Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) images of foraminifera acquired from various open-source databases for image classification. The analysis was conducted using Python programming language in Google Colaboratory. The image dataset is categorized based on its genus (n: 138) and divided into training and test/validation data for accuracy simulation (total image: 1833; data training: 1387; test/validation: 237/237). The best-fit accuracy values of the training-data and testing-data were between 97-86%:73-77%, with parameters including epoch number ranging up to 40, learning rates of 0.05, and a batch size of 64. These values indicate good prospects for foraminifera SEM Image taxonomic classification, demonstrating a noteworthy level of identification accuracy (63%). The outcomes of this study offer a new method for further effective automated morpho-taxonomic identification of foraminifera fossils using other conventional optic microscopy.

Superpixel‐guided locality preserving projection and spatial–spectral classification for hyperspectral image

Superpixel‐guided locality preserving projection and spatial–spectral classification for hyperspectral image

Classification of pain expression images in elderly with hip fractures based on improved ResNet50 network.

The aim of this study is designed an improved ResNet 50 network to achieve automatic classification model for pain expressions by elderly patients with hip fractures. This study built a dataset by combining the advantages of deep learning in image recognition, using a hybrid of the Multi-Task Cascaded Convolutional Neural Networks (MTCNN). Based on ResNet50 network framework utilized transfer learning to implement model function. This study performed the hyperparameters by Bayesian optimization in the learning process. This study calculated intraclass correlation between visual analog scale scores provided by clinicians independently and those provided by pain expression evaluation assistant(PEEA). The automatic pain expression recognition model in elderly patients with hip fractures, which constructed using the algorithm. The accuracy achieved 99.6% on the training set, 98.7% on the validation set, and 98.2% on the test set. The substantial kappa coefficient of 0.683 confirmed the efficacy of PEEA in clinic. This study demonstrates that the improved ResNet50 network can be used to construct an automatic pain expression recognition model for elderly patients with hip fractures, which has higher accuracy.

Comparative evaluation of image-based vs. text-based vs. multimodal AI approaches for automatic breast density assessment in mammograms

Background and objectivesIn the last decade, there has been a growing interest in applying artificial intelligence (AI) systems to breast cancer assessment, including breast density evaluation. However, few models have been developed to integrate textual mammographic reports and mammographic images. Our aims are (1) to generate a natural language processing (NLP)-based AI system, (2) to evaluate an external image-based software, and (3) to develop a multimodal system, using the late fusion approach, by integrating image and text inferences for the automatic classification of breast density according to the American College of Radiology (ACR) guidelines in mammograms and radiological reports. MethodsWe first compared different NLP models, three based on n-gram term frequency – inverse document frequency and two transformer-based architectures, using 1533 unstructured mammogram reports as a training set and 303 reports as a test set. Subsequently, we evaluated an external image-based software using 303 mammogram images. Finally, we assessed our multimodal system taking into account both text and mammogram images. ResultsOur best NLP model achieved 88% accuracy, while the external software and the multimodal system achieved 75% and 80% accuracy, respectively, in classifying ACR breast densities. ConclusionAlthough our multimodal system outperforms the image-based tool, it currently does not improve the results offered by the NLP model for ACR breast density classification. Nevertheless, the promising results observed here open the possibility to more comprehensive studies regarding the utilization of multimodal tools in the assessment of breast density.

R2C-GAN: Restore-to-Classify Generative Adversarial Networks for blind X-ray restoration and COVID-19 classification

Restoration of poor-quality medical images with a blended set of artifacts plays a vital role in a reliable diagnosis. As a pioneer study in blind X-ray restoration, we propose a joint model for generic image restoration and classification: Restore-to-Classify Generative Adversarial Networks (R2C-GANs). This is the first generic restoration approach forming an Image-to-Image translation task from poor-quality having noisy, blurry, or over/under-exposed images to high-quality image domain where forward and inverse transformations are learned using unpaired training samples. Simultaneously, the joint classification preserves the diagnostic-related label during restoration. Each R2C-GAN is equipped with operational layers/neurons in a compact architecture. The proposed joint model successfully restores images while achieving state-of-the-art Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) classification with above 90% in F1-Score. In qualitative analysis, the restoration performance is confirmed by medical doctors where 68% of the restored images are selected against the original images. We share the software implementation at https://github.com/meteahishali/R2C-GAN.

Lumbar intervertebral disc detection and classification with novel deep learning models

Low back pain (LBP) is a prevalent spinal issue, affecting eight out of ten individuals. Notably, lumbar intervertebral disc (IVD) abnormalities frequently contribute to LBP. To diagnose LBP, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is crucial for obtaining detailed spinal images. This paper employs deep learning (DL) to detect and locate lumbar IVD in sagittal MR images. It further classifies lumbar IVDs as healthy or herniated, utilizing both novel convolutional neural network (CNN) and conventional CNN models. The dataset utilized comprises MR images from 32 patients, with 10 exhibiting healthy discs and the remaining 22 posing a mix of healthy and herniated discs, totaling 160 lumbar discs, incorporating 112 healthy and 48 herniated discs. In this study, ResNet-50 architecture in the Novel Lumbar IVD detection (NLID) model served as the feature extractor to segment the five lumbar IVDs from MR images. The features extracted from ResNet-50 were input into YOLOv2 for the identification of the region of interest (ROI). The findings indicate that optimal performance was achieved at the 22nd Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation layer, boasting a remarkable 99.59% average precision, 97.22% F1-score, 94.59% precision, and a perfect 100% recall. This commendable performance consistently held above the 85% threshold until the 22nd ReLU activation layer. Regarding imbalanced dataset classification, AlexNet emerged as the frontrunner among other pre-trained networks, boasting the highest test accuracy of 90.63%, and an impressive F1 score of 88.77%. Meanwhile, the Novel Lumbar IVD Classification (NLIC) model achieved superior results with 93.75% test accuracy, and 92.27% F1-score. In the setting of the balanced dataset, NLIC achieved 96.88% test accuracy, and 96.46% F1-score with fewer epochs compared to AlexNet, affirming the robustness of the novel trained-from-scratch network. These findings distinctly underscore the effectiveness of CNNs in both medical image segmentation and classification.

A novel URP-CNN model for bond credit risk evaluation of Chinese listed companies

The effective identification of bond credit risk is critical for maintaining stability in the bond market and safeguarding investor rights. This paper proposes a URP-CNN model for evaluating bond credit risk of Chinese listed companies. This model effectively combines the unique advantages of the Unthresholded Recurrence plot in extracting and representing spatial domain association information, along with the powerful performance of Convolutional Neural Networks in image feature extraction and classification tasks, thus demonstrating outstanding overall performance in tackling the complex task of predicting default of listed company bonds. The research results show that the URP-CNN model constructed in this paper improves accuracy by 1 %–10 % and F1 score by 10 %–30 % compared to other methods, ensuring accurate identification of non-defaulting enterprises while effectively reducing Type II-Error occurrence rates. Furthermore, the combination of URP method and machine learning models significantly enhances model effectiveness. Compared to single models, models combined with the URP method show varying degrees of improvement in accuracy and F1-score numerical indicators.

Assessing forest fragmentation due to land use changes from 1992 to 2023: A spatio-temporal analysis using remote sensing data

The increasing pressures of urban development and agricultural expansion have significant implications for land use and land cover (LULC) dynamics, particularly in ecologically sensitive regions like the Murree and Kotli Sattian tehsils of the Rawalpindi district in Pakistan. This study's primary objective is to assess spatial variations within each LULC category over three decades (1992–2023) using cross-tabulation in ArcGIS to identify changes in LULC and investigates into forest fragmentation analysis using the Landscape Fragmentation Tool (LFTv2.0) to classify forest into several classes such as patch, edge, perforated, small core, medium core, and large core. Utilizing remote sensing data from Landsat 5 and Landsat 9 satellites, the research focuses on the temporal dynamics in various land classes including Coniferous Forest (CF), Evergreen Forest (EF), Arable Land (AR), Buildup Area (BU), Barren Land (BA), Water (WA), and Grassland (GL). The Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier and ArcGIS software were employed for image processing and classification, ensuring accuracy in categorizing different land types. Our results indicate a notable reduction in forested areas, with Coniferous Forest (CF) decreasing from 363.9 km2, constituting 45.0 % of the area in 1992, to 291.5 km2 (36.0 %) in 2023, representing a total decrease of 72.4 km2. Similarly, Evergreen Forests have also seen a significant reduction, from 177.9 km2 (22.0 %) in 1992 to 99.8 km2 (12.3 %) in 2023, a decrease of 78.1 km2. The study investigates into forest fragmentation analysis using the Landscape Fragmentation Tool (LFTv2.0), revealing an increase in fragmentation and a decrease in large core forests from 20.3 % of the total area in 1992 to 7.2 % in 2023. Additionally, the patch forest area increased from 2.4 % in 1992 to 5.9 % in 2023, indicating significant fragmentation. Transition matrices and a Sankey diagram illustrate the transitions between different LULC classes, providing a comprehensive view of the dynamics of land-use changes and their implications for ecosystem services. These findings highlight the critical need for robust conservation strategies and effective land management practices. The study contributes to the understanding of LULC dynamics and forest fragmentation in the Himalayan region of Pakistan, offering insights essential for future land management and policymaking in the face of rapid environmental changes.