Deep learning-based framework for monitoring of debris-covered glacier from remotely sensed images

In recent years, deep learning (DL) methods have proven their efficiency for various computer vision (CV) tasks such as image classification, natural language processing, and object detection. However, training a DL model is expensive in terms of both complexities of the network structure and the amount of labeled data needed. In addition, the imbalance among available labeled data for different classes of interest may also adversely affect the model accuracy. This paper addresses these issues using a new convolutional neural network (CNN) based architecture. The proposed network incorporates both spatial and spectral information that combines two sub-networks: spatial-CNN and spectral-CNN. The spectral-CNN extracts spectral information, while spatial-CNN captures spatial information. Moreover, to make the features more robust, a multiscale spatial CNN architecture is introduced using different kernels. The final feature vector is formed by concatenating the outputs obtained from both spatial-CNN and spectral-CNN. To address the data imbalance problem, a generative adversarial network (GAN) was used to generate data for the underrepresented class. Finally, relatively a shallower network architecture was used to reduce the number of parameters in the network and improve the processing speed. The proposed model was trained and tested on Senitel-2 images for the classification of the debris-covered glacier. The results showed that the proposed method is well-suited for mapping and monitoring debris-covered glaciers at a large scale with high classification accuracy. In addition, we compared the proposed method with conventional machine learning approaches, support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF) and multilayer perceptron (MLP).