Remote sensing scene classification using multiple pyramid pooling

Abstract

Remote sensing image scene classification has gained remarkable attention, due to its versatile use in different applications like geospatial object detection, ground object information extraction, environment monitoring and etc. The scene not only contains the information of the ground objects, but also includes the spatial relationship between the ground objects and the environment. With rapid growth of the amount of remote sensing image data, the need for automatic annotation methods for image scenes is more urgent. This paper proposes a new framework for high resolution remote sensing images scene classification based on convolutional neural network. To eliminate the requirement of fixed-size input image, multiple pyramid pooling strategy is equipped between convolutional layers and fully connected layers. Then, the fixed-size features generated by multiple pyramid pooling layer was extended to one-dimension fixed-length vector and fed into fully connected layers. Our method could generate a fixed-length representation regardless of image size, at the same time get higher classification accuracy. On UC-Merced and NWPU-RESISC45 datasets, our framework achieved satisfying accuracies, which is 93.24% and 88.62% respectively.