Hybrid Deep Learning Architecture for Land Use: Land Cover Images Classification with a Comparative and Experimental Study

Deep Learning algorithms have become more popular in computer vision, especially in the image classification field. This last has many applications such as moving object detection, cancer detection, and the classification of satellite images, also called images of land use-land cover (LULC), which are the scope of this paper. It represents the most commonly used method for decision making in the sustainable management of natural resources at various geographical levels. However, methods of satellite images analysis are expensive in the computational time and did not show good performance. Therefore, this paper, on the one hand, proposes a new CNN architecture called Modified MobileNet V1 (MMN) based on the fusion of MobileNet V1 and ResNet50. On the other hand, it presents a comparative study of the proposed model and the most used models based on transfer learning, i.e. MobileNet V1, VGG16, DenseNet201, and ResNet50. The experiments were conducted on the dataset Eurosat, and they show that ResNet50 results emulate the other models.