EFFECTS OF RANDOMIZING PATTERNS AND TRAINING UNEQUALLY REPRESENTED CLASSES FOR ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS

Artificial neural networks (ANN) have been successfully used for classifying remotely sensed imagery. However, ANN still is not the preferable choice for classification over the conventional classification methodology such as the maximum likelihood classifier commonly used in the industry production environment. This can be attributed to the ANN characteristic built-in stochastic process that creates difficulties in dealing with unequally represented training classes, and its training performance speed. In this paper we examined some practical aspects of training classes when using a back propagation neural network model for remotely sensed imagery. During the classification process of remotely sensed imagery, representative training patterns for each class are collected by polygons or by using a region-growing methodology over the imagery. The number of collected training patterns for each class may vary from several pixels to thousands. This unequally populated training data may cause the significant problems some neural network empirical models such as back-propagation have experienced. We investigate the effects of training over- or under- represented training patterns in classes and propose the pattern repopulation algorithm, and an adaptive alpha adjustment (AAA) algorithm to handle unequally represented classes. We also show the performance improvement when input patterns are presented in random fashion during the back-propagation training.