How to Develop a Deep CNN to Classify Satellite Photos of the Amazon Rainforest

The Planet dataset has become a standard computer vision benchmark that involves classifying or tagging the contents satellite photos of Amazon tropical rainforest. The dataset was the basis of a data science competition on the Kaggle website and was effectively solved. Nevertheless, it can be used as the basis for learning and practicing how to develop, evaluate, and use convolutional deep learning neural networks for image classification from scratch. This includes how to develop a robust test harness for estimating the performance of the model, how to explore improvements to the model, and how to save the model and later load it to make predictions on new data. In this tutorial, you will discover how to develop a convolutional neural network to classify satellite photos of the Amazon tropical rainforest. How to Develop a Convolutional Neural Network to Classify Satellite Photos of the Amazon Rainforest Photo by Anna & Michal, some rights reserved. The "Planet: Understanding the Amazon from Space" competition was held on Kaggle in 2017. The competition involved classifying small squares of satellite images taken from space of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil in terms of 17 classes, such as "agriculture", "clear", and "water". Given the name of the competition, the dataset is often referred to simply as the "Planet dataset". The color images were provided in both TIFF and JPEG format with the size 256 256 pixels. A total of 40,779 images were provided in the training dataset and 40,669 images were provided in the test set for which predictions were required. The problem is an example of a multi-label image classification task, where one or more class labels must be predicted for each label. This is different from multi-class classification, where each image is assigned one from among many classes. The multiple class labels were provided for each image in the training dataset with an accompanying file that mapped the image filename to the string class labels. The competition was run for approximately four months (April to July in 2017) and a total of 938 teams participated, generating much discussion around the use of data preparation, data augmentation, and the use of convolutional neural networks.