Selective Kernel Spatial Feature Extraction based Deep Learning Approach for Identification and Classification of Archaeological Sites

Deep Learning (DL) based identification and classification of archaeological sites are being used progressively from satellite images obtained from Geographic Information System (GIS). Even though, there were promising results from the existing researches, there is still need to enhance the classification with distinct features of the satellite images. The methods found challenging to accurately or partially identify an archaeological feature especially in a complex landscape due to lack of distinction between archaeological and non-archaeological features. For this, the geo-referenced satellite images are considered in this research, which are pre-processed using min-max normalization for efficient data analysis and to remove unwanted data. The Selective kernel spatial Feature Extraction (SFE) module is used to improve the feature extraction process where the spatial features are extracted. The extracted features are then classified using Fully Convoluted Deep Neural Network (FCDNN) for effective identification and classification of archaeological sites. The results showed that the proposed SFE-FCDNN achieved better classification accuracy with 98.83%, precision of 97.41%, and an error rate of 1.71 when compared to the existing methods such as Neural Network (NN), and Backpropagation Neural Network (BNN).