Classification of land cover based on deep belief networks using polarimetric RADARSAT-2 data

Urban land use and land cover (LULC) classification is one of the core applications in Geographic Information Sys-tem(GIS). In this paper, a novel classification approach based on Deep Belief Network(DBN) for detailed urban mapping is proposed. Deep Belief Network (DBN) is a widely investigated and deployed deep learning model. By applying the DBN model, effective spatio-temporal mapping features can be automatically extracted to improve the classification performance. Six-date RADARSAT-2 Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) data over the Great Toronto Area were used for evaluation. Experimental results showed that the proposed method can outperform SVM and contextual approaches using adaptive MRF.