A Hybrid Transfer Learning Framework for Seasonal Classification of Satellite Images
TL;DR
This study proposes a hybrid transfer learning-based framework for seasonal classification using satellite images collected from 81 provinces of Türkiye and shows that both the choice of pretrained feature extractor and the classifier affect seasonal classification performance.
Abstract
Seasonal classification from satellite imagery is an important remote sensing task for monitoring vegetation dynamics, agricultural processes, environmental change, and climate-related spatial patterns. However, developing robust deep learning models for this task is challenging due to limited labeled data, regional variability, and the computational cost of training large-scale networks from scratch. This study proposes a hybrid transfer learning-based framework for seasonal classification using satellite images collected from 81 provinces of Türkiye. A custom dataset was constructed from monthly satellite images, and eight pretrained deep learning architectures were evaluated as feature extractors. The extracted deep representations were classified using seven machine learning algorithms. The experimental results showed that both the choice of pretrained feature extractor and the classifier affect seasonal classification performance. Among models, ConvNeXt combined with the Multi-Layer Perceptron achieved the best performance. Based on the comparative analysis, ConvNeXt, Vision Transformer, and Swin Transformer were selected as the top three feature extractors, while the Multi-Layer Perceptron was selected as the final classifier. The proposed framework provides an effective and computationally practical approach for seasonal classification and offers a promising basis for future environmental monitoring and agricultural remote sensing applications.