Surface object recognition with CNN and SVM in Landsat 8 images

There is a series of earth observation satellites called Landsat, which send a very large amount of image data every day such that it is hard to analyze manually. Thus an effective application of machine learning techniques to automatically analyze such data is called for. In surface object recognition, which is one of the important applications of such data, the distribution of a specific object on the surface is surveyed. In this paper, we propose and compare two methods for surface object recognition, one using the convolutional neural network (CNN) and the other support vector machine (SVM). In our experiments, CNN showed higher performance than SVM. In addition, we observed that the number of negative samples have a influence on the performance, and it is necessary to select the number of them for practical use.