The International Arab Journal of Information Technology (IAJIT)

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Evaluation of Deep Learning Models for Remote Sensing Segmentation and Classification

The rapid changes in Deep Learning (DL) have made better performing models for Remote Sensing Images (RSIs), particularly for semantic segmentation and multi-class classification. This study looks at how two common DL structures, U-Net and DeepLabV3+, perform on segmentation tasks, while 201-layer Densely Connected Convolutional Network (DenseNet201- CNN) is compared to Visual Geometry Group 16-layer network (VGG16) for classification tasks. The dataset for segmentation has aerial images of Dubai labeled with pixel-level segmentation across six classes: Building, land, road, vegetation, water, and unlabeled. The classification data set called Remote Sensing Image-Collection of Benchmark 256 (RSI-CB256) has Remote Sensing (RS) pictures sorted into four groups: Cloudy, desert, green_area, and water. DeepLabV3+ demonstrated better training performance and convergence behavior compared to U-Net, exhibiting more stable learning and efficient boundary detection during segmentation. While both models performed competitively, DeepLabV3+ consistently showed stronger generalization capability, making it more effective in delineating complex land cover boundaries. In contrast, U-Net displayed sensitivity to hyperparameters and greater variation in performance, indicating the need for further tuning and regularization. U-Net was good initially but had varied performance and was sensitive to hyperparameters suggesting the need of better regularization techniques. In terms of the classification, DenseNet201-CNN did better than VGG16 in precision, recall, and F1-score for all categories. Notable performance gains were observed in “cloudy” and “desert” classes where DenseNet201-CNN model demonstrated significantly fewer misclassifications. Overall, DenseNet201-CNN outperformed VGG16 in terms of total classification accuracy. These results establish DenseNet201-CNN as a superior choice in RSI classification tasks in this study.

 

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