Satellite image scene classification via convnet with context aggregation

Abstract

Scene classification is a fundamental problem to understand the high-resolution remote sensing imagery. Recently, convolutional neural network (ConvNet) has achieved remarkable performance in different tasks, and significant efforts have been made to develop various representations for satellite image scene classification. In this paper, we present a novel representation based on a ConvNet with context aggregation. The proposed two-pathway ResNet (ResNet-TP) architecture adopts the ResNet [1] as backbone, and the two pathways allow the network to model both local details and regional context. The ResNet-TP based representation is generated by global average pooling on the last convolutional layers from both pathways. Experiments on two scene classification datasets, UCM Land Use and NWPU-RESISC45, show that the proposed mechanism achieves promising improvements over state-of-the-art methods.