Remote sensing scene classification by unsupervised representation learning

With the rapid development of the satellite sensor technology, high spatial resolution remote sensing (HSR) data have attracted extensive attention in military and civilian applications. In order to make full use of these data, remote sensing scene classification becomes an important and necessary precedent task. In this paper, an unsupervised representation learning method is proposed to investigate deconvolution networks for remote sensing scene classification. First, a shallow weighted deconvolution network is utilized to learn a set of feature maps and filters for each image by minimizing the reconstruction error between the input image and the convolution result. The learned feature maps can capture the abundant edge and texture information of high spatial resolution images, which is definitely important for remote sensing images. After that, the spatial pyramid model (SPM) is used to aggregate features at different scales to maintain the spatial layout of HSR image scene. A discriminative representation for HSR image is obtained by combining the proposed weighted deconvolution model and SPM. Finally, the representation vector is input into a support vector machine to finish classification. We apply our method on two challenging HSR image data sets: the UCMerced data set with 21 scene categories and the Sydney data set with seven land-use categories. All the experimental results achieved by the proposed method outperform most state of the arts, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.