Neural Network-Based Analysis of Forest Fire Aftermath in Class-Imbalanced Remote Sensing Earth Image Classification

Abstract. Today's agricultural sector is characterized by an important role of accurate mapping and monitoring of agriculture with the help of satellite imagery, which allows to optimize the use of resources, to plan crop areas and to forecast productivity. Classification of satellite images with unbalanced sample distribution is a critical problem in this regard. Traditional machine learning algorithms in particular have limitations in dealing with sample imbalance. In this paper, we proposed convolution neural networks for semantic segmentation, where sample imbalance is considered based on a particular loss function coupled with data augmentation. To illustrate our method, we use Sentinel-2 remote sensing (RS) images covering a number of regions in Ukraine, and then we create an image dataset of the region and for training and testing make data augmentation. The models with different architectural features were investigated.
The results demonstrate that the proposed CNN has a higher classification accuracy than the ones discussed in the paper: the classification accuracy on the test dataset reached 96.7% with intersection-over-union values of up to 89.7%. This opens the way for further research in the direction of refining algorithms for classify satellite data with an imbalanced class structure.