Application of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for Synthetic Training Data Creation to improve performance of ANN Classifier for extracting Built-Up pixels from Landsat Satellite Imagery
This work addresses data scarcity for remote sensing researchers, but it is incremental as it applies an existing GAN method to a specific domain problem.
The paper tackled the problem of limited training data for pixel-based classification of built-up areas in Landsat satellite imagery by using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to generate synthetic training data, resulting in improved overall accuracy from 0.9331 to 0.9983 and kappa coefficient from 0.8277 to 0.9958.
Training a neural network for pixel based classification task using low resolution Landsat images is difficult as the size of the training data is usually small due to less number of available pixels that represent a single class without any mixing with other classes. Due to this scarcity of training data, neural network may not be able to attain expected level of accuracy. This limitation could be overcome using a generative network that aims to generate synthetic data having the same distribution as the sample data with which it is trained. In this work, we have proposed a methodology for improving the performance of ANN classifier to identify built-up pixels in the Landsat$7$ image with the help of developing a simple GAN architecture that could generate synthetic training pixels when trained using original set of sample built-up pixels. To ensure that the marginal and joint distributions of all the bands corresponding to the generated and original set of pixels are indistinguishable, non-parametric Kolmogorov Smirnov Test and Ball Divergence based Equality of Distributions Test have been performed respectively. It has been observed that the overall accuracy and kappa coefficient of the ANN model for built-up classification have continuously improved from $0.9331$ to $0.9983$ and $0.8277$ to $0.9958$ respectively, with the inclusion of generated sets of built-up pixels to the original one.