An Expanded Latent Space Autoencoder for Land Cover Classification of Remote Sensing Images from EuroSAT

Image classification has been instrumental in the interpretation and labeling of images in the field of remote sensing, computer vision, and in robotics applications. Machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms, particularly artificial neural networks, are extensively utilized for this purpose. In this work we propose the Expanded Latent Space Autoencoder (ELSA) with a case use application to classify land cover data. The main idea on the ELSA network structure is to utilize the latent spaces of multiple internal autoencoders in order to create an expanded latent space. This expanded latent space extracts more information from the input data, and serves as input features for a more simpler classifier network. In order to evaluate the proposed network's ability to extract features and classify complex and multispectral images we employed it to the EuroSAT dataset. The results demonstrate a remarkable capacity for feature extraction using the ELSA network, with lower complexity, trained with a reduced number of images. The classifier network achieved a final accuracy of 98.7%, matching or exceeding the performance of more complex state-of-the-art models.