Efficient deep learning models for land cover image classification

The availability of the sheer volume of Copernicus Sentinel imagery has created new opportunities for land use land cover (LULC) mapping at large scales using deep learning. Training on such large datasets though is a non-trivial task. In this work we experiment with the BigEarthNet dataset for LULC image classification and benchmark different state-of-the-art models, including Convolution Neural Networks, Multi-Layer Perceptrons, Visual Transformers, EfficientNets and Wide Residual Networks (WRN) architectures. Our aim is to leverage classification accuracy, training time and inference rate. We propose a framework based on EfficientNets for compound scaling of WRNs in terms of network depth, width and input data resolution, for efficiently training and testing different model setups. We design a novel scaled WRN architecture enhanced with an Efficient Channel Attention mechanism. Our proposed lightweight model has an order of magnitude less trainable parameters, achieves 4.5% higher averaged f-score classification accuracy for all 19 LULC classes and is trained two times faster with respect to a ResNet50 state-of-the-art model that we use as a baseline. We provide access to more than 50 trained models, along with our code for distributed training on multiple GPU nodes.