Land Classification using Convolutional Neural Networks

Identifying the physical aspect of the earth’s surface (Land cover) and also how we exploit the land (Land use) is a challenging problem in environment monitoring and much of other subdomains. One of the most efficient ways to do this is through Remote Sensing (analyzing satellite images). For such classification using satellite images, there exist many algorithms and methods, but they have several problems associated with them, such as improper feature extraction, poor efficiency, etc. Problems associated with established land-use classification methods can be solved by using various optimization techniques with the Convolutional neural networks(CNN). The structure of the Convolutional neural network model is modified to improve the classification performance, and the overfitting phenomenon that may occur during training is avoided by optimizing the training algorithm. This work mainly focuses on classifying land types such as forest lands, bare lands, residential buildings, Rivers, Highways, cultivated lands, etc. The outcome of this work can be further processed for monitoring in various domains.