Classification of EgyptSat-1 Images Using Deep Learning Methods

Background: Deep Learning (DL) neural network methods have become a hotspot subject of research in the remote sensing field. Classification of aerial satellite images depends on spectral content, which is a challenging topic in remote sensing. Objective: With the aim to accomplish a high performance and accuracy of Egyptsat-1 satellite image classification, the use of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is raised in this paper because CNN is considered a leading deep learning method. CNN is developed to classify aerial photographs into land cover classes such as urban, vegetation, desert, water bodies, soil, roads, etc. In our work, a comparison between MAXIMUM Likelihood (ML) which represents the traditional supervised classification methods and CNN method is conducted. Conclusion: This research finds that CNN outperforms ML by 9%. The convolutional neural network has better classification result, which reached 92.25% as its average accuracy. Also, the experiments showed that the convolutional neural network is the most satisfactory and effective classification method applied to classify Egyptsat-1 satellite images.