Dictionaries of deep features for land-use scene classification of very high spatial resolution images

Abstract

Land-use classification in very high spatial resolution images is critical in the remote sensing field. Consequently, remarkable efforts have been conducted towards developing increasingly accurate approaches for this task. In recent years, deep learning has emerged as a dominant paradigm for machine learning, and methodologies based on deep convolutional neural networks have received particular attention from the remote sensing community. These methods typically utilize transfer learning and/or data augmentation to accommodate a small number of labeled images in the publicly available datasets in this field. However, they typically require powerful computers and/or a long time for training. In this work, we propose a simple and novel method for land-use classification in very high spatial resolution images, which efficiently combines transfer learning with a sparse representation. Specifically, the proposed method performs the classification of land-use scenes using a modified version of the well-known sparse representation-based classification method. While this method directly uses the training images to form dictionaries, which are employed to classify test images, our method utilizes a pre-trained deep convolutional neural network and the Gaussian mixture model to generate more robust and compact “dictionaries of deep features.” The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated on two publicly available datasets: UC Merced and Brazilian Cerrado–Savana. The experimental results suggest that our method can potentially outperform state-of-the-art techniques for land-use classification in very high spatial resolution images.