A Deep Learning Model Based on Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization for Scene Classification in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Recently, the increase in inexpensive and compact unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and light-weight imaging sensors has led to an interest in using them in various remote sensing applications. The processes of collecting, calibrating, registering, and processing data from miniature UAVs and interpreting the data semantically are time-consuming. In UAV aerial imagery, learning effective image representations is central to the scene classification process. Earlier approaches to the scene classification process depended on feature coding methods with low-level hand-engineered features or unsupervised feature learning. These methods could produce mid-level image features with restricted representational abilities, which generally yielded mediocre results. The development of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has made image classification more efficient. Due to the limited resources in UAVs, it is hard to fine-tune the hyperparameters and the trade-offs between classifier results and computation complexity. This paper introduces a new multi-objective optimization model for evolving state-of-the-art deep CNNs for scene classification, which generates the non-dominant solutions in an automated way at the Pareto front. We use a set of two benchmark datasets to test the performance of the scene classification model and make a detailed comparative study. The proposed method attains a very low computational time of 80 sec and maximum accuracy of 97.88% compared to all other methods. The proposed method is found to be appropriate for the effective scene classification of images captured by UAVs.