A two-band convolutional neural network for satellite image classification

Abstract

The advent of neural networks has led to the development of image classification algorithms that are applied to different fields. In order to recover the vital spatial factor parameters, for example, land cover and land utilization, image grouping is most important in remote sensing. Recently, benchmark classification accuracy was achieved using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for land cover classification. The most well-known tool which indicates the presence of green vegetation from multispectral pictures is the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). This chaper utilizes the success of the NDVI for effective classification of a new satellite dataset, SAT-4, where the classes involved are types of vegetation. As NDVI calculations require only two bands of information, it takes advantage of both RED- and NIR-band information to classify different land cover. The number and size of filters affect the number of parameters in convolutional networks. Restricting the aggregate number of trainable parameters reduces the complexity of the function and accordingly decreases overfitting. The ConvNet Architecture with two band information, along with a reduced number of filters, was trained, and high-level features obtained from a tested model managed to classify different land cover classes in the dataset. The proposed architecture, results in the total reduction of trainable parameters, while retaining high accuracy, when compared with existing architecture, which uses four bands.