Forest Mapping from Hyperspectral Image Using Deep Belief Network

Forest type is very important in the management of the forest ecosystem. Previous literatures demonstrate that deep belief network (DBN) gain the excellent classification performance. This research attempts to classify the forest type from hyperspectral image using DBN. To begin with, the Restricted Boltzmann Machines and deep belief networks are briefly reviewed. Then, the effect of network depth and the number of hidden units on the accuracy and Kappa efficient is discussed. Furthermore, forest type is classified using DBN by Python language, comparing with typical classification methods, such as support vector machine (SVM). The experimental results show that the number of layers is 3 and the number of nodes is 256 are the optimal network structure for forest type identification. The overall accuracy is 85.8% and the coefficient is 0.785, which is better than the classification performance of support vector machine. In general, deep belief network has the potential to be the dominant method of forest mapping by hyperspectral image.