The dilated convolution algorithm, which is widely used for image segmentation, is applied in the image classification field in this paper. In many traditional image classification algorithms, convolution neural network (CNN) plays an important role. However, the classical CNN has the problem of consuming too much computing resources. To solve this problem, first, this paper proposed a dilated CNN model which is built through replacing the convolution kernels of traditional CNN by the dilated convolution kernels, and then, the dilated CNN model is tested on the Mnist handwritten digital recognition data set. Second, to solve the detail loss problem in the dilated CNN model, the hybrid dilated CNN (HDC) is built by stacking dilated convolution kernels with different dilation rates, and then the HDC model is tested on the wide-band remote sensing image data set of earth’s terrain. The results show that under the same environment, compared with the traditional CNN model, the dilated CNN model reduces the training time by 12.99% and improves the training accuracy by 2.86% averagely, compared with the dilated CNN model, the HDC model reduces the training time by 2.02% and improves the training and testing accuracy by 14.15% and 15.35% averagely. Therefore, the dilated CNN and HDC model proposed in this paper can significantly improve the image classification performance.