BENCHMARKING DEEP LEARNING FRAMEWORKS FOR THE CLASSIFICATION OF VERY HIGH RESOLUTION SATELLITE MULTISPECTRAL DATA

Abstract. In this paper we evaluated deep-learning frameworks based on Convolutional Neural Networks for the accurate classification of multispectral remote sensing data. Certain state-of-the-art models have been tested on the publicly available SAT-4 and SAT-6 high resolution satellite multispectral datasets. In particular, the performed benchmark included the AlexNet, AlexNet-small and VGG models which had been trained and applied to both datasets exploiting all the available spectral information. Deep Belief Networks, Autoencoders and other semi-supervised frameworks have been, also, compared. The high level features that were calculated from the tested models managed to classify the different land cover classes with significantly high accuracy rates i.e., above 99.9%. The experimental results demonstrate the great potentials of advanced deep-learning frameworks for the supervised classification of high resolution multispectral remote sensing data.