FlexibleNet: A New Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network Model for Estimating Carbon Sequestration Qualitatively Using Remote Sensing

Many heavy and lightweight convolutional neural networks (CNNs) require large datasets and parameter tuning. Moreover, they consume time and computer resources. A new lightweight model called FlexibleNet was created to overcome these obstacles. The new lightweight model is a CNN scaling-based model (width, depth, and resolution). Unlike the conventional practice, which arbitrarily scales these factors, FlexibleNet uniformly scales the network width, depth, and resolution with a set of fixed scaling coefficients. The new model was tested by qualitatively estimating sequestered carbon in the aboveground forest biomass from Sentinel-2 images. We also created three different sizes of training datasets. The new training datasets consisted of six qualitative categories (no carbon, very low, low, medium, high, and very high). The results showed that FlexibleNet was better or comparable to the other lightweight or heavy CNN models concerning the number of parameters and time requirements. Moreover, FlexibleNet had the highest accuracy compared to these CNN models. Finally, the FlexibleNet model showed robustness and low parameter tuning requirements when a small dataset was provided for training compared to other models.