Agricultural Plantation Classification using Transfer Learning Approach based on CNN

TL;DR

This paper explores using transfer learning with CNN and MLP models to improve hyper-spectral agricultural plantation classification, reducing training time and data dependence while maintaining accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a transfer learning approach for hyper-spectral image classification that reduces training time and data requirements, with a detailed comparison of CNN and MLP architectures.

Findings

Transfer learning reduces training time significantly.

Scaling layers can cause overfitting without accuracy gains.

Transfer learning maintains accuracy with less training data.

Abstract

Hyper-spectral images are images captured from a satellite that gives spatial and spectral information of specific region.A Hyper-spectral image contains much more number of channels as compared to a RGB image, hence containing more information about entities within the image. It makes them well suited for the classification of objects in a snap. In the past years, the efficiency of hyper-spectral image recognition has increased significantly with deep learning. The Convolution Neural Network(CNN) and Multi-Layer Perceptron(MLP) has demonstrated to be an excellent process of classifying images. However, they suffer from the issues of long training time and requirement of large amounts of the labeled data, to achieve the expected outcome. These issues become more complex while dealing with hyper-spectral images. To decrease the training time and reduce the dependence on large labeled data-set, we propose using the method of transfer learning.The features learned by CNN and MLP models are then used by the transfer learning model to solve a new classification problem on an unseen dataset. A detailed comparison of CNN and multiple MLP architectural models is performed, to determine an optimum architecture that suits best the objective. The results show that the scaling of layers not always leads to increase in accuracy but often leads to over-fitting, and also an increase in the training time.The training time is reduced to greater extent by applying the transfer learning approach rather than just approaching the problem by directly training a new model on large data-sets, without much affecting the accuracy.