Ground Coverage Classification in UAV Image Using a Convolutional Neural Network Feature Map

Background: To understand land transformation at the local level, there is a need to develop new strategies appropriate for land management policies and practices. In various geographical research, ground coverage plays an important role particularly in planning, physical geography explorations, environmental analysis, and sustainable planning. Objective: The research aimed to analyze land cover using vegetation density data collected through remote sensing. Specifically, the data assisted in land processing and land cover classification based on vegetation density. Methods: Before classification, image was preprocessed using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture's ResNet 50 and DenseNet 121 feature extraction methods. Furthermore, several algorithm were used, namely Decision Tree, Naïve Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbor, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). Results: Classification comparison between methods showed that using CNN method obtained better results than machine learning. By using CNN architecture for feature extraction, SVM method, which adopted ResNet-50 for feature extraction, achieved an impressive accuracy of 85%. Similarly using SVM method with DenseNet121 feature extraction led to a performance of 81%. Conclusion: Based on results comparing CNN and machine learning, ResNet 50 architecture performed the best, achieving a result of 92%. Meanwhile, SVM performed better than other machine learning method, achieving an 84% accuracy rate with ResNet-50 feature extraction. XGBoost came next, with an 82% accuracy rate using the same ResNet-50 feature extraction. Finally, SVM and XGBoost produced the best results for feature extraction using DenseNet-121, with an accuracy rate of 81%.