Improving LULC classification from satellite imagery using deep learning - Eurosat dataset

Abstract

Machine learning (ML) has proven useful for a very large number of applications in several domains. It has realized a remarkable growth in remote-sensing image analysis over the past few years. Deep Learning (DL) a subset of machine learning were applied in this work to achieve a better classification of Land Use Land Cover (LULC) in satellite imagery using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). EuroSAT benchmarking data set is used as training data set which uses Sentinel-2 satellite images. Sentinel-2 provides images with 13 spectral feature bands, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to these features in deep learning models. The majority of applications focused only on using RGB due to high availability of the RGB models in computer vision. While RGB gives an accuracy of 96.83% using CNN, we are presenting two approaches to improve the classification performance of Sentinel-2 images. In the first approach, features are extracted from 13 spectral feature bands of Sentinel-2 instead of RGB which leads to accuracy of 98.78%. In the second approach features are extracted from 13 spectral bands of Sentinel-2 in addition to calculated indices used in LULC like Blue Ratio (BR), Vegetation index based on Red Edge (VIRE) and Normalized Near Infrared (NNIR), etc. which gives a better accuracy of 99.58%.