Improved Agricultural Field Segmentation in Satellite Imagery Using TL-ResUNet Architecture

Abstract

Currently, there is a growing population around the world, and this is particularly true in developing countries, where food security is becoming a major problem. Therefore, agricultural land monitoring, land use classification and analysis, and achieving high yields through efficient land use are important research topics in precision agriculture. Deep learning-based algorithms for the classification of satellite images provide more reliable and accurate results than traditional classification algorithms. In this study, we propose a transfer learning based residual UNet architecture (TL-ResUNet) model, which is a semantic segmentation deep neural network model of land cover classification and segmentation using satellite images. The proposed model combines the strengths of residual network, transfer learning, and UNet architecture. We tested the model on public datasets such as DeepGlobe, and the results showed that our proposed model outperforms the classic models initiated with random weights and pre-trained ImageNet coefficients. The TL-ResUNet model outperforms other models on several metrics commonly used as accuracy and performance measures for semantic segmentation tasks. Particularly, we obtained an IoU score of 0.81 on the validation subset of the DeepGlobe dataset for the TL-ResUNet model.

Keywords

• image segmentation
• agriculture
• satellite imagery
• deep learning
• UNet architecture
• transfer learning