Leveraging Cloud Resources for Distributed Training of Residual CNNs in Aerial Image Classification

Aerial image classification is crucial across multiple sectors, including environmental monitoring, agriculture, and urban planning. However, processing large-scale aerial imagery efficiently poses challenges in model performance, computational efficiency, and scalability. This research introduces a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture tailored for cactus identification from aerial photographs. The proposed cloud-based pipeline enhances training efficiency through scalable data storage, preprocessing, and distributed training across platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. This comparative analysis demonstrates the model’s computational efficiency, shorter training durations, and cost-effectiveness. The model integrates residual connections and depthwise separable convolutions, achieving 96.7% accuracy on the aerial cactus identification dataset. The results highlight the model’s high performance, cost-efficiency, and scalability, making it suitable for real-world aerial image classification tasks. Future work aims to further optimize the model using advanced techniques and extend its application to multi-class classification challenges.