An Entropy and MRF Model-Based CNN for Large-Scale Landsat Image Classification

Large-scale Landsat image classification is essential for the production of land cover maps. The rise of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) provides a new idea for the implementation of Landsat image classification. However, pixels in Landsat images have higher uncertainty compared with high-resolution images due to its 30-m spatial resolution. In addition, the current deep learning methods tend to lose detailed information such as boundaries along with the stacking of convolutional and pooling layers. To solve these problems, we propose a new method called entropy and MRF model (EMM)-CNN based on Pyramid Scene Parsing Network. The EMM-CNN uses entropy to decrease the uncertainty of pixels. Then, the Markov random filed (MRF) model is employed to construct the connections between neighboring pixels and defined a prior distribution to prevent the cross entropy from sacrificing detailed information for the overall accuracy. Finally, transfer learning based on the pretrained ImageNet is introduced to overcome the shortage of training samples and boost the speed of the training process. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed EMM-CNN is able to obtain classification results with fine structure by decreasing the uncertainty and retaining detailed information of the detected image.