Semisupervised Scene Classification for Remote Sensing Images: A Method Based on Convolutional Neural Networks and Ensemble Learning

Abstract

The scarcity of labeled samples has been the main obstacle to the development of scene classification for remote sensing images. To alleviate this problem, the efforts have been dedicated to semisupervised classification which exploits both labeled and unlabeled samples for training classifiers. In this letter, we propose a novel semisupervised method that utilizes the effective residual convolutional neural network (ResNet) to extract preliminary image features. Moreover, the strategy of ensemble learning (EL) is adopted to establish discriminative image representations by exploring the intrinsic information of all available data. Finally, supervised learning is performed for scene classification. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, it is further compared with several state-of-the-art feature representation and semisupervised classification approaches. The experimental results show that by combining ResNet features with EL, the proposed method can obtain more effective image representations and achieve superior results.