Scene classification of high resolution remote sensing images using convolutional neural networks

Scene classification of high resolution remote sensing images plays an important role for a wide range of applications. While significant efforts have been made in developing various methods for scene classification, most of them are based on handcrafted or shallow learning-based features. In this paper, we investigate the use of deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for scene classification. To this end, we first adopt two simple and effective strategies to extract CNN features: (1) using pre-trained CNN models as universal feature extractors, and (2) domain-specifically fine-tuning pre-trained CNN models on our scene classification dataset. Then, scene classification is carried out by using simple classifiers such as linear support vector machine (SVM). In our work, three off-the-shelf CNN models including AlexNet [1], VGGNet [2], and GoogleNet [3] are investigated. Comprehensive evaluations on a publicly available 21 classes land use dataset and comparisons with several state-of-the-art approaches demonstrate that deep CNN features are effective for scene classification of high resolution remote sensing images.