EVALUATION OF DIFFERENT PARAMETERS FOR PLANT CLASSIFICATION BY PRE-TRAINED DEEP LEARNING MODELS WITH BIGEARTHNET DATASET

Abstract. Vegetation monitoring and mapping are essential for a diverse range of environmental problems such as forest management, food resources, and climate change assessment. Several methods have been developed to classify different vegetation types based on remote sensing (RS) data. Land use classification has been revolutionized with the advent of neural networks. Various vegetation types were classified using multispectral Sentinel-2 satellite images due to their high spatial resolution and spectral information. Deep Convolutional Neural Network is considered a promising method for classifying remote sensing images with high spatial resolution due to its powerful feature extraction capabilities. However, large labeled datasets are required for better classification performance, so we have used pre-trained ResNet networks with 152 layers, 50 layers, and 101 layers trained on Big Earth Net (BEN). In order to obtain the best network performance and evaluate the sensitivity of the parameters in this study, we have performed two experiments: 1) the effect of different patch sizes and 2) increasing the number of images. The results demonstrate that ResNet 152 shows the highest accuracy with patches of 120 × 120 pixels, with an accuracy of 76.62%, and ResNet 50 is the best with an accuracy of 76.2% since the process of this network does not take much time.