Current Trends in Deep Learning for Earth Observation: An Open-source Benchmark Arena for Image Classification

We present 'AiTLAS: Benchmark Arena' -- an open-source benchmark framework for evaluating state-of-the-art deep learning approaches for image classification in Earth Observation (EO). To this end, we present a comprehensive comparative analysis of more than 400 models derived from nine different state-of-the-art architectures, and compare them to a variety of multi-class and multi-label classification tasks from 22 datasets with different sizes and properties. In addition to models trained entirely on these datasets, we also benchmark models trained in the context of transfer learning, leveraging pre-trained model variants, as it is typically performed in practice. All presented approaches are general and can be easily extended to many other remote sensing image classification tasks not considered in this study. To ensure reproducibility and facilitate better usability and further developments, all of the experimental resources including the trained models, model configurations and processing details of the datasets (with their corresponding splits used for training and evaluating the models) are publicly available on the repository: https://github.com/biasvariancelabs/aitlas-arena.