Scene classification of high spatial resolution (HSR) images can provide data support for many practical applications, such as land planning and utilization, and it has been a crucial research topic in the remote sensing (RS) community. Recently, deep learning methods driven by massive data show the impressive ability of feature learning in the field of HSR scene classification, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Although traditional CNNs achieve good classification results, it is difficult for them to effectively capture potential context relationships. The graphs have powerful capacity to represent the relevance of data, and graph-based deep learning methods can spontaneously learn intrinsic attributes contained in RS images. Inspired by the abovementioned facts, we develop a deep feature aggregation framework driven by graph convolutional network (DFAGCN) for the HSR scene classification. First, the off-the-shelf CNN pretrained on ImageNet is employed to obtain multilayer features. Second, a graph convolutional network-based model is introduced to effectively reveal patch-to-patch correlations of convolutional feature maps, and more refined features can be harvested. Finally, a weighted concatenation method is adopted to integrate multiple features (i.e., multilayer convolutional features and fully connected features) by introducing three weighting coefficients, and then a linear classifier is employed to predict semantic classes of query images. Experimental results performed on the UCM, AID, RSSCN7, and NWPU-RESISC45 data sets demonstrate that the proposed DFAGCN framework obtains more competitive performance than some state-of-the-art methods of scene classification in terms of OAs.

Scene classification is an indispensable part of remote sensing image interpretation, and various convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods have been explored to improve classification accuracy. Although they have shown good classification performance on high-resolution remote sensing (HRRS) images, discriminative ability of extracted features is still limited. In this letter, a high-performance joint framework combined CNNs and vision transformer (ViT) (CTNet) is proposed to further boost the discriminative ability of features for HRRS scene classification. The CTNet method contains two modules, including the stream of ViT (T-stream) and the stream of CNNs (C-stream). For the T-stream, flattened image patches are sent into pretrained ViT model to mine semantic features in HRRS images. To complement with T-stream, pretrained CNN is transferred to extract local structural features in the C-stream. Then, semantic features and structural features are concatenated to predict labels of unknown samples. Finally, a joint loss function is developed to optimize the joint model and increase the intraclass aggregation. The highest accuracies on the aerial image dataset (AID) and Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU)-RESISC45 datasets obtained by the CTNet method are 97.70% and 95.49%, respectively. The classification results reveal that the proposed method achieves high classification performance compared with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

Scene classification is an active research topic in the remote sensing community, and complex spatial layouts with various types of objects bring huge challenges to classification. Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods attempt to explore the global features by gradually expanding the receptive field, while long-range contextual information is ignored. Vision transformer (ViT) can extract contextual features, but the learning ability of local information is limited, and it has a large computational complexity simultaneously. In this article, an end-to-end method is exploited by employing ViT as an excellent teacher for guiding small networks (ET-GSNet) in the remote sensing image scene classification. In the ET-GSNet, ResNet18 is selected as the student model, which integrates the superiorities of the two models via knowledge distillation (KD), and the computational complexity does not increase. In the KD process, the ViT and ResNet18 are optimized together without independent pretraining, and the learning rate of teacher model gradually decreases until zero, while the weight coefficient of the KD loss module is doubled. Based on the above procedures, dark knowledge from the teacher model can be transferred to the student model more smoothly. Experimental results on the four public remote sensing datasets demonstrate that the proposed ET-GSNet method possesses the superior classification performance compared to some state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. In addition, we evaluate the ET-GSNet on a fine-grained ship recognition dataset, and the results show that our method has good generalization for different tasks in terms of some metrics.

The scene classification of high spatial resolution (HSR) images is a challenging task in the remote sensing community. How to construct a discriminative representation of the HSR scene is a key step to improve classification performance. In this letter, we propose a novel feature extraction method termed multilayer feature fusion network (MF²Net) for scene classification. At first, the transferred VGGNet-16 model is employed as a feature extractor to acquire multilayer convolutional features. Then, several layers including pooling, transformation, and fusion layers are designed to process hierarchical features in four branches, and the prediction probability can be obtained for classification. Finally, the proposed model is optimized by fine-tuning techniques, where a novel data augmentation approach is explored to improve generalization ability. As a result, MF²Net effectively applies useful information from multilayers to improve the accuracy of scene classification. The experimental results on AID and NWPU-RESISC45 data sets exhibit that the MF²Net method obtains quite competitive classification results compared with many state-of-the-art methods.

High spatial resolution remote sensing (HSRRS) images contain complex geometrical structures and spatial patterns, and thus HSRRS scene classification has become a significant challenge in the remote sensing community. In recent years, convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods have attracted tremendous attention and obtained excellent performance in scene classification. However, traditional CNN-based methods focus on processing original red-green-blue (RGB) image-based features or CNN-based single-layer features to achieve the scene representation, and ignore that texture images or each layer of CNNs contain discriminating information. To address the above-mentioned drawbacks, a CaffeNet-based method termed CTFCNN is proposed to effectively explore the discriminating ability of a pre-trained CNN in this paper. At first, the pretrained CNN model is employed as a feature extractor to obtain convolutional features from multiple layers, fully connected (FC) features, and local binary pattern (LBP)-based FC features. Then, a new improved bag-of-view-word (iBoVW) coding method is developed to represent the discriminating information from each convolutional layer. Finally, weighted concatenation is employed to combine different features for classification. Experiments on the UC-Merced dataset and Aerial Image Dataset (AID) demonstrate that the proposed CTFCNN method performs significantly better than some state-of-the-art methods, and the overall accuracy can reach 98.44% and 94.91%, respectively. This indicates that the proposed framework can provide a discriminating description for HSRRS images.