As a type of expansive soil, black cotton soil swells when absorbing water and shrinks when dehydrated, and the cycle of swellingshrinking movements can readily occur repeatedly. These characteristics result in serious consequences both to land surfaces and to surface buildings such as ground fracturing, building settling, and road buckling and cracking, having extreme adverse effects on the quality and safety of road transportation. With Kitui, Kenya as the research area and a GF-1 remote sensing image as the vector, this study focuses on in-depth exploration of the application of a deep belief network to identify and classify black cotton soil based on the characteristics of the local black cotton soil in the remote sensing image. The results indicate that given the sample database available to this study, when the network depth was 3, the number of nodes in each hidden layer was 60, the learning rate was 0.01, the number of iterations was 20, and the number of samples was 2,000,000. The best classification result could be achieved with a precision of about 90% per the evaluation criteria proposed in this study, indicating a significant advantage of the deep belief network in remote sensing identification of black cotton soil.