Multi-Scale Convolutional SVM Networks for Multi-Class Classification Problems of Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

The classification of land-cover classes in remote sensing images can suit a variety of interdisciplinary applications such as the interpretation of natural and man-made processes on the Earth surface. The Convolutional Support Vector Machine (CSVM) network was recently proposed as binary classifier for the detection of objects in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) images. The training phase of the CSVM is based on convolutional layers that learn the kernel weights via a set of linear Support Vector Machines (SVMs). This paper proposes the Multi-scale Convolutional Support Vector Machine (MCSVM) network, that is an ensemble of CSVM classifiers which process patches of different spatial sizes and can deal with multi-class classification problems. The experiments are carried out on the EuroSAT Sentinel-2 dataset and the results are compared to the one obtained with recent transfer learning approaches based on pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs).