Classification of High-Spatial-Resolution Remote Sensing Scenes Method Using Transfer Learning and Deep Convolutional Neural Network

The deep convolutional neural network (DeCNN) is considered one of promising techniques for classifying the high-spatial-resolution remote sensing (HSRRS) scenes, due to its powerful feature extraction capabilities. It is well-known that huge high-quality labeled datasets are required for achieving the better classification performances and preventing overfitting, during the training DeCNN model process. However, the lack of high-quality datasets limits the applications of DeCNN. In order to solve this problem, in this article, we propose a HSRRS image scene classification method using transfer learning and the DeCNN (TL-DeCNN) model in a few shot HSRRS scene samples. Specifically, three typical DeCNNs of VGG19, ResNet50, and InceptionV3, trained on the ImageNet2015, the weights of their convolutional layer for that of the TL-DeCNN are transferred, respectively. Then, TL-DeCNN just needs to fine-tune its classification module on the few shot HSRRS scene samples in a few epochs. Experimental results indicate that our proposed TL-DeCNN method provides absolute dominance results without overfitting, when compared with the VGG19, ResNet50, and InceptionV3, directly trained on the few shot samples.