Hybrid ConvNeXt-Liquid Neural Network for Satellite Image Classification: A Benchmark on EuroSAT Dataset

Recognizing land use and land cover (LULC) elements in satellite imagery is an important foundational point for environmental tracking applications, as well as urban development and sustainable development projects. This research demonstrates the implementation of a [hybrid ConvNeXt+liquid neural network (LNN)] deep learning systems that study EuroSAT multispectral optical satellite images to carry out a classification task. The proposed model combination of convolutional feature extraction together with advanced representation learning established superior class separability for detecting the ten different LULC categories. In this model maintained excellent performance levels were maintained through 50 epochs has achieving a training accuracy of 98.79% with a training loss of 0.0350 and validation accuracy 97.41% with validation loss 0.0793, leading to a test accuracy of 97.26% with a test loss of 0.0815. The model received standard classification metrics assessments and confusion matrix analysis to produce evaluation outcomes that examined per-class precision and recall, together with $F1$ -score metrics. ROC curve analysis delivered substantial area under the curve (AUC) results during the complete class examination phase. t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) and uniform manifold approximation and projection (UMAP) were applied to the high-dimensional feature vectors to visualize the learned representations, revealing well-separated clusters for each class. This indicates that the hybrid ConvNeXt+LNN model effectively captures class-specific feature distributions in latent space, enabling robust discrimination across all ten LULC categories. Compared to state-of-the-art baseline models, the proposed ConvNeXt+LNN model achieves a higher test accuracy of 97.26% while maintaining enhanced computational efficiency, requiring only 625.79 s/epoch and a reduced parameter count (7.8M versus 23.5M in ResNet-50). The final research demonstrates validation of the developed approach as an effective and scalable satellite-based LULC classification solution that supports geospatial systems that can be utilized for the National Geospatial Mission and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).