Land Cover Quantification using Autoencoder based Unsupervised Deep Learning

Abstract

This work aims to develop a deep learning model for land cover quantification through hyperspectral unmixing using an unsupervised autoencoder. Land cover identification and classification is instrumental in urban planning, environmental monitoring and land management. With the technological advancements in remote sensing, hyperspectral imagery which captures high resolution images of the earth's surface across hundreds of wavelength bands, is becoming increasingly popular. The high spectral information in these images can be analyzed to identify the various target materials present in the image scene based on their unique reflectance patterns. An autoencoder is a deep learning model that can perform spectral unmixing by decomposing the complex image spectra into its constituent materials and estimating their abundance compositions. The advantage of using this technique for land cover quantification is that it is completely unsupervised and eliminates the need for labelled data which generally requires years of field survey and formulation of detailed maps. We evaluate the performance of the autoencoder on various synthetic and real hyperspectral images consisting of different land covers using similarity metrics and abundance maps. The scalability of the technique with respect to landscapes is assessed by evaluating its performance on hyperspectral images spanning across 100m x 100m, 200m x 200m, 1000m x 1000m, 4000m x 4000m and 5000m x 5000m regions. Finally, we analyze the performance of this technique by comparing it to several supervised learning methods like Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF) and multilayer perceptron using F1-score, Precision and Recall metrics and other unsupervised techniques like K-Means, N-Findr, and VCA using cosine similarity, mean square error and estimated abundances. The land cover classification obtained using this technique is compared to the existing United States National Land Cover Database (NLCD) classification standard.