Soil Classification Based on Deep Learning Algorithm and Visible Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

Changes in land cover will cause the changes in the climate and environmental characteristics, which has an important influence on the social economy and ecosystem. The main form of land cover is different types of soil. Compared with traditional methods, visible and near-infrared spectroscopy technology can classify different types of soil rapidly, effectively, and nondestructively. Based on the visible near-infrared spectroscopy technology, this paper takes the soil of six different land cover types in Qingdao, China orchards, woodlands, tea plantations, farmlands, bare lands, and grasslands as examples and establishes a convolutional neural network classification model. The classification results of different number of training samples are analyzed and compared with the support vector machine algorithm. Under the condition that Kennard–Stone algorithm divides the calibration set, the classification results of six different soil types and single six soil types by convolutional neural network are better than those by the support vector machine. Under the condition of randomly dividing the calibration set according to the proportion of 1/3 and 1/4, the classification results by convolutional neural network are also better. The aim of this study is to analyze the feasibility of land cover classification with small samples by convolutional neural network and, according to the deep learning algorithm, to explore new methods for rapid, nondestructive, and accurate classification of the land cover.