A multi-scale approach for remote sensing scene classification based on feature maps selection and region representation

Abstract

Scene classification is one of the bases for automatic remote sensing image interpretation. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks have presented promising performance in high-resolution remote sensing scene classification research. In general, most researchers directly use raw deep features extracted from the convolutional networks to classify scenes. However, this strategy only considers single scale features, which cannot describe both the local and global features of images. In fact, the dissimilarity of scene targets in the same category may result in convolutional features being unable to classify them into the same category. Besides, the similarity of the global features in different categories may also lead to failure of fully connected layer features to distinguish them. To address these issues, we propose a scene classification method based on multi-scale deep feature representation (MDFR), which mainly includes two contributions: (1) region-based features selection and representation; and (2) multi-scale features fusion. Initially, the proposed method filters the multi-scale deep features extracted from pre-trained convolutional networks. Subsequently, these features are fused via two efficient fusion methods. Our method utilizes the complementarity between local features and global features by effectively exploiting the features of different scales and discarding the redundant information in features. Experimental results on three benchmark high-resolution remote sensing image datasets indicate that the proposed method is comparable to some state-of-the-art algorithms.