This deep learning model is designed for land use land cover (LULC) classification using Sentinel 2 satellite imagery. It takes a Sentinel 2 tile as input and produces a tile that annotates each pixel with a class according to ESRI’s 9 class LULC maps.It extracts relevant features from the input imagery and classify each pixel into one of the predefined land use land cover classes. The accuracy of model is 75% to 90%, depending on the geographyWhat follows is a description of the classes for which the model was trained along with their index number:
Index | Class Name | Description |
---|---|---|
1 | Water | Areas where water was predominantly present throughout the year; may not cover areas with sporadic or ephemeral water; contains little to no sparse vegetation, no rock outcrop nor built up features like docks; examples: rivers, ponds, lakes, oceans, flooded salt plains. |
2 | Trees | Any significant clustering of tall (~15-m or higher) dense vegetation, typically with a closed or dense canopy; examples: wooded vegetation, clusters of dense tall vegetation within savannas, plantations, swamp or mangroves (dense/tall vegetation with ephemeral water or canopy too thick to detect water underneath). |
4 | Flooded vegetation | Areas of any type of vegetation with obvious intermixing of water throughout a majority of the year; seasonally flooded area that is a mix of grass/shrub/trees/bare ground; examples: flooded mangroves, emergent vegetation, rice paddies and other heavily irrigated and inundated agriculture. |
5 | Crops | Human planted/plotted cereals, grasses, and crops not at tree height; examples: corn, wheat, soy, fallow plots of structured land. |
7 | Built Area | Human made structures; major road and rail networks; large homogenous impervious surfaces including parking structures, office buildings and residential housing; examples: houses, dense villages / towns / cities, paved roads, asphalt. |
8 | Bare ground | Areas of rock or soil with very sparse to no vegetation for the entire year; large areas of sand and deserts with no to little vegetation; examples: exposed rock or soil, desert and sand dunes, dry salt flats/pans, dried lake beds, mines. |
9 | Snow/Ice | Large homogenous areas of permanent snow or ice, typically only in mountain areas or highest latitudes; examples: glaciers, permanent snowpack, snow fields. |
10 | Clouds | No land cover information due to persistent cloud cover. |
11 | Rangeland | Open areas covered in homogenous grasses with little to no taller vegetation; wild cereals and grasses with no obvious human plotting (i.e., not a plotted field); examples: natural meadows and fields with sparse to no tree cover, open savanna with few to no trees, parks/golf courses/lawns, pastures. Mix of small clusters of plants or single plants dispersed on a landscape that shows exposed soil or rock; scrub-filled clearings within dense forests that are clearly not taller than trees; examples: moderate to sparse cover of bushes, shrubs and tufts of grass, savannas with very sparse grasses, trees or other plants. |