Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification Using Bag of Convolutional Features

Abstract

More recently, remote sensing image classification has been moving from pixel-level interpretation to scene-level semantic understanding, which aims to label each scene image with a specific semantic class. While significant efforts have been made in developing various methods for remote sensing image scene classification, most of them rely on handcrafted features. In this letter, we propose a novel feature representation method for scene classification, named bag of convolutional features (BoCF). Different from the traditional bag of visual words-based methods in which the visual words are usually obtained by using handcrafted feature descriptors, the proposed BoCF generates visual words from deep convolutional features using off-the-shelf convolutional neural networks. Extensive evaluations on a publicly available remote sensing image scene classification benchmark and comparison with the state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed BoCF method for remote sensing image scene classification.