IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL.
21, 2024
Automatic Identification of Tree Species
From Sentinel-2A Images Using Band
Combinations and Deep Learning
Vaghela Himali P.
Abstract— Tree species identification using satellite images has
been a prominent research topic in the field of remote sensing
image analysis. So, this letter discussed an approach that explores
various band combinations and deep learning models to identify
tree species in the Madurai region from Sentinel-2A images.
In the subject of identifying tree species, many machine-learning
algorithms have been created. However, the ML model requires
user intervention in selecting the features to process, which is
time-consuming and based on trial and error. Owing to the
existence of such gaps, this letter discusses a hybrid deep learning
approach where feature extraction is performed using neural
network blocks such as VGG, MobileNet, and ResNet, and
classification is performed using a random forest (RF) classifier.
Among all combinations, ResNet-RF gives 90.75% accuracy, and
it outperforms gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM)-RF and
other state-of-the-art deep learning models.
Index Terms— Deep learning, feature extraction, random forest
(RF), ResNet block, stacking bands, tree species identification.
I. I NTRODUCTION
T HERE are dominating tree species such as banana,
coconut, guava, mango, and papaya that are available
in Madurai, South India. These trees are both an essential
component of the rural economy in Indian states and a
significant source of revenue for the development of the nation.
As a result, accurate identification is a task that is challenging
to perform, and there is no such system built in India that
can monitor species using multispectral data. Physical ground
surveys to monitor tree species are time-consuming, expensive,
and prone to human error. However, remote sensing-based
technology gives the best solution for species identification,
area coverage analysis, yield estimation, disease identification,
and so on. So, this research aims to identify tree species using
Sentinel-2A bands where different bands are used for a wide
range of applications, including monitoring land and coastal
areas, vegetation monitoring [1], forest stress monitoring,
urban waterbody management [2], quantifying above-ground
biomass, and so on.
For early diagnosis of disease in crops, Hassan et al. [3]
introduced shallow VGG networks with RF and XGBoost clas-
sifiers and Kumar and Kannan [4] introduced the hybrid model
of XGBoost and the Inception ResNet deep learning model
and proved that it outperformed all comparative methods. For
Manuscript received 19 May 2023; revised 3 January 2024;
accepted 10 January 2024. Date of publication 16 January 2024; date of
current version 5 February 2024. (Corresponding author: Vaghela Himali P.)
The authors are with the Remote Sensing and GIS Laboratory,
Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai 625015, India (e-mail:
vaghela@student.tce.edu; alaguraja@tce.edu).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LGRS.2024.3354814
1558-0571 © 2024 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
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2501405
and R. A. Alagu Raja
land cover and crop type classification, Kussul et al. [10]
introduced 1D and 2D-CNN that ensemble with a random
forest (RF) classifier with nineteen multitemporal scenes while
Aboneh et al. [11] introduced the stacked ensemble classifier
technique and proved that the proposed method outperformed
any single classifier. To classify woody and herbaceous crops,
Peña et al. [8] and Ma et al. [5] suggested SVM, Decision Tree
(DT), RF, and logistic regression with feature extraction using
the gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) feature extractor.
But GLCM is not suitable when an image consists of a high
level of noise [9]. Hu et al. [6] introduced SVM classifier to
identify tree species based on individual and combined spectral
and textural information while Axelsson et al. [7] introduced
Bayesian inference using satellite-based Sentinel-2A images.
Sonobe et al. [12] introduced the performance of several
vegetation indices and spectral bands to distinguish between
the different types of crops [13]. But vegetation indices are
sensitive to atmospheric effects such as aerosols, which may
lead to misclassification in identifying different crops as well
as analyzing the features from indices are time-consuming and
expensive. So, this research emphasis on for making process
time efficient.
By analyzing the relevant research publications, it is
clear that the feature engineering performed by hand-crafted
features has constraints, which may be caused by noise,
lighting conditions, and image distortions as well as it is also a
time-consuming task to choose proper feature extractors. This
problem can be overcome by using neural networks because
they perform the feature engineering on their own. However,
as the number of layers increases in neural networks, the usage
of pooling layers diminishes the features. So, to address these
challenges, this study employs a hybrid approach where fea-
ture extractions are performed using blocks of neural network
and classification is performed using an RF classifier with the
help of the four different band combinations. So, the contri-
bution of this research is to use neural network-based features
instead of hand-crafted features with four band combinations.
II. DATASET C OLLECTION
This letter addresses the problem of identification of tree
species such as banana, coconut, guava, mango, and papaya
in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India (10.840390◦ N to 9.84553◦ N,
77.74750◦ E to 78.73077◦ E) using Sentinel-2A data. Sentinel-
2A has a total of 13 bands, including blue (band 2), green
(band 3), red (band 4), and near-infrared (NIR-band 8) with a
resolution of 10 m, red-edge (bands 5-6-7), NIR-2 (band 8A),
and short-wave infrared (SWIR-band 11-12) with a resolution
of 20 m, and three atmospheric bands (band 1, band 9, and
band 10) with a resolution of 60 m. However, not all bands are
 2501405 IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 21, 2024

Fig. 1. Madurai region study area and examples of labeled training data.

TABLE I
T REE S PECIES S AMPLE C OLLECTION A ND I MAGE PATCH C OUNTS

useful for identifying tree species; hence, 60 m bands are not

taken into account in this study. So, among the 13 Sentinel-
2 bands, this study used band combinations containing bands
8-8A-11-12 since combinations containing these bands helped
in identifying different types of vegetation [14].
Fig. 2. Methodological framework for tree species classification using
The reference data for all tree species is collected through Sentinel-2A imagery.
field visits, along with their latitude and longitude values. The
list of the collected samples and the number of image patches TABLE II
used for this study are shown in Table I. The required image is S ATELLITE BAND C OMBINATIONS F OR
downloaded from scihub.copernicus.eu for the date of January V EGETATION A ND T REE S PECIES A NALYSIS
18, 2021, and different patches of the study area are collected
from LandViewer. Fig. 1 shows the study area of the Madurai
region and sample patches collected for different tree species
with their labeled data.

III. M ETHODOLOGY
The identification of tree species in India is underexplored
as a nature management tool, but with the help of machine
learning and deep learning techniques, it is possible to
identify them automatically. So, this letter deals with
the identification of tree species using Sentinel-2A band
combinations and a hybrid deep learning approach. Fig. 2
shows the methodological framework, where training involves
the use of Sentinel-2A satellite images with two sets of bands:
Bands 2, 3, 4, 8 with a resolution of 10 m, and Bands 5, 6,
7, 8A, 11, 12 with a resolution of 20 m. The latter set is
resampled to 10 m using transposed convolution to match the and SWIR, feature extraction is performed on each band
resolution of the first set. combination, utilizing four different methods: GLCM, VGG,
Using these two sets, multiple band combinations are MobileNet, and ResNet. The extracted features from each band
created which are given in Table II. Using these four band combination are then stacked in layers and input into an RF
combinations, namely FCC, agriculture, vegetation analysis, classifier which trains these images with its labeled data.

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 HIMALI AND RAJA: AUTOMATIC IDENTIFICATION OF TREE SPECIES FROM SENTINEL-2A IMAGES
TABLE III
C OMPARATIVE A NALYSIS OF S TACKED BAND C OMBINATIONS
IN S ATELLITE I MAGING C ASES
TABLE IV
D IVERSE F EATURE E XTRACTION A PPROCHES
IN T REE S PECIES I DENTIFICATION
Here, labeled data indicated the location of tree species in
an image. Using these band combinations, the experiments
are conducted in the four cases mentioned in Table III, which
describes how various band combinations are stacked in each
case.
Table IV gives an idea of the GLCM features and blocks
of neural networks that are used as feature extractors. These
blocks are used as non-trainable parameters in Python. The
advantages of using non-trainable networks are that they are
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2501405
Fig. 3. Tree species spectral reflectance patterns in Sentinel-2A bands.
faster to use because they do not require any training. The
pretrained weights and biases can be directly used to make
predictions on new data. It can lead to improved accuracy,
be less prone to overfitting, require less data, and be more
time-saving compared to hand-crafted features. Here, six
GLCM features are used, so single band combinations will
give six GLCM features, and for four band combinations, the
features will be 6 × 4 = 24. So, a total of 24 features are
stacked together as per Case 4. For the neural network blocks
such as VGG, MobileNet, and ResNet, a single block extracted
64 features for a single band combination. As a result of four
different band combinations yielding 64 × 4 = 256 features,
these 256 auto-generated features are fed into the RF classifier.
This classifier performs on a given set of combinations and
generates an output of the area covered by tree species.
The performance of each of the four different scenarios is
evaluated based on sensitivity or recall, specificity, precision,
f1-score, and overall accuracy. Sensitivity or recall is
calculated by (1), which shows that out of all tree species
pixels, how many are correctly predicted as tree species, and
specificity is calculated by (2) shows the ability of the model
to predict the pixels that do not belong to tree species (TN-
True Negative). It can be defined as follows:
TP
SensitivityorRecall = (1)
TP + FN
TN
Specificity = . (2)
TN + FP
The precision refers to the true positive (tree species pixels)
out of the total number of positive predictions (pixels predicted
as tree species). The harmonic means of precision and recall,
known as the f1-score, is used to determine which case among
the four produces better results. Overall accuracy (OA) is the
probability that an individual will be correctly classified by
a test. The terms precision, f1-score, and OA can be given
by (3)–(5), respectively,
TP
Precision = (3)
TP + FP
2 ∗ Precision ∗ Recall
F1-Score = (4)
Precision + Recall
Sum of all diagonal elements
OverallAccuracy = . (5)
Total number of pixels
IV. R ESULT AND D ISCUSSION
The automatic identification of tree species from satellite
imagery plays a crucial role in forestry management and
conservation efforts. So, this study examines Sentinel-2A
 2501405
Fig. 4. (a)–(f) Overview of classification results for tree species using various convolutional neural networks and RF. (a) Original Images. (b) Labeled data.
(c) Result obtained by GLCM-RF (Case 4). (d) Result obtained by VGG-RF. (e) Result obtained by MobileNet-RF (Case 4). (f) Result obtained by ResNet-RF
(Case 4).
band combinations and hybrid deep learning methods for
tree species identification in the Madurai region. The various
band combinations used in this study are highly related
to vegetation, enhance spectral information, and improve
discrimination between different tree species. Another reason
to choose these band combinations is the mean spectral
reflectance, which helps to analyze the reflectance of each
type of tree in each band. As shown in Fig. 3, our findings
suggest that bands 2-3-4-6-7-8-8A have higher reflectance for
banana; bands 6-7-11-12 have higher reflectance for coconut;
and bands 8-8A-11-12 are much more useful for finding all
types of tree species, and these bands are showing clear
discrimination among all tree species. Therefore, experiments
are performed with only four band combinations that contain
bands 8, 8A, 11, and 12. The reason to use limited bands is that
increasing the number of bands will increase the complexity of
the model exponentially. So, this study shows the effectiveness
of stacking different band combinations. The choice of band
combinations significantly influenced the accuracy of species
identification. After choosing appropriate band combinations,
complex patterns and features are extracted using hand-crafted
features like GLCM and different neural network blocks such
as VGG, MobileNet, and ResNet.
By introducing GLCM-RF, Ma et al. [5] obtained an OA
of 86.49%, whereas for tree species identification, GLCM-
RF achieved an OA of 55.97% for case 4. Because GLCM
is not discriminative enough to distinguish between different
classes in satellite images, and because objects in satellite
images have complex interactions between texture, shape,
size, and color, it is challenging to distinguish between
them based on texture alone. By using Bayesian inference,
Axelsson et al. [7] achieved an OA of 87% to classify the
tree species in Sweden. Hu et al. [6] achieved an OA of 89%
by combining different structural and textural information.
A shallow VGG structure with RF classifier gives 90.37%,
as suggested by Hassan et al. [3]. But the limitation of
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IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS, VOL. 21, 2024
TABLE V
RF C LASSIFIER H YPERPARAMETERS C ONFIGURATION
neural networks like VGG, MobileNet, and ResNet is the
maxpooling layers that reduce the spatial dimensionality of
the features and cause a loss of spatial information that
is crucial for semantic segmentation. So, by analyzing the
different research works, this letter introduced non-trainable
networks for feature extractions that the makes process fast
and computationally less expensive. These deep learning
blocks exhibited remarkable capabilities in extracting intricate
features and patterns. After extracting features from different
band combinations, these features are fed to the RF classifier.
The required hyperparameters used for the RF classifier is
listed in Table V.
The training of an RF classifier is performed with
different feature extractors and with stacking of different band
combinations (Case 1, Case 2, Case 3, and Case 4). As the
stacking of band combinations increased, it became more
effective in capturing relevant spectral information, which the
classification performance across all models.
Table VI presents the performance analysis of the proposed
method with different band combinations using GLCM-RF,
VGG-RF, MobileNet-RF, and ResNet-RF. The performance
metrics evaluated include specificity, precision, recall, F1
 HIMALI AND RAJA: AUTOMATIC IDENTIFICATION OF TREE SPECIES FROM SENTINEL-2A IMAGES
TABLE VI
P ERFORMANCE M ETRICS OF T REE S PECIES I DENTIFICATION U SING
VARIOUS F EATURE E XTRACTION AND RF M ETHODS
score, and OA. The GLCM-RF achieved relatively lower
performance compared to the other models. In Case 1,
it achieved an OA of 52.14% with low precision, recall,
and F1-score values. As the stacking of band combinations
increased (from Case 2 to Case 4), there was a gradual
improvement in the performance metrics, with OA reaching
57.10% in Case 4. However, the OA remained relatively low
because GLCM is poor at capturing complex and abstract
features from satellite data. The VGG-RF model outperformed
the GLCM-RF model in all cases. It demonstrated better
performance with higher OA values ranging from 65.42%
(Case 1) to 69.12% (Case 4). The precision, recall, and
F1 score also improved consistently as the stacking of
band combinations increased. This indicates that the VGG-
RF model effectively captured important features from
the input data and achieved better classification accuracy.
The MobileNet-RF model showed further improvement in
performance compared to the VGG-RF model. It achieved
higher OA values ranging from 71.16% (Case 1) to 75.53%
(Case 4), as well as precision, recall, and F1-score that
consistently increased, indicating the model’s ability to
extract more discriminative features. The ResNet-RF model
demonstrated the highest performance among all the models
evaluated. It achieved significantly higher OA values, ranging
from 78.81% (Case 1) to 90.75% (Case 4). The precision,
recall, and F1-scores also showed consistent improvement
across different band combinations. This suggests that the
ResNet-RF model effectively learned complex patterns and
features, resulting in accurate tree species identification. It has
improved OA of 33.65%, 21.63%, and 15.22% compared to
GLCM-RF, VGG-RF, and MobileNet-RF, respectively. Thus,
much improved results are obtained for all tree species by
stacking the band combinations. Fig. 4 shows the results
predicted by the RF classifier for all four cases. This proposed
method was executed on a system with a Ryzen 5 AMD
processor and 8 GB of RAM with Python 3.6.8.
V. C ONCLUSION
The study explored the automatic identification of tree
species from Sentinel-2A images using band combinations
and deep learning techniques. The results suggested that the
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2501405
inclusion of relevant band combinations (Cases 1–4) in the
analysis led to improved performance in all the models.
Among the models, ResNet-RF consistently outperformed
the others, achieving the highest OA in all cases. The OA
achieved by ResNet-RF is 90.75%, which is 33.65%, 21.63%,
and 15.22% higher compared to GLCM-RF, VGG-RF, and
MobileNet-RF, respectively. These findings have significant
implications for forestry management, conservation efforts,
and monitoring tree species distribution on a larger scale. But
further accuracy can be improved by providing time-series data
for a combination of different bands.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the All India Council
for Technical Education (AICTE), New Delhi, Government
of India for the National Doctoral Fellowship (NDF/ADF)
scheme.
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