Unsupervised Representation High-Resolution Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification via Contrastive Learning Convolutional Neural Network

Inspired by the outstanding achievement of deep learning, supervised deep learning representation methods for high-spatial-resolution remote sensing image scene classification obtained state-of-the-art performance. However, supervised deep learning representation methods need a considerable amount of labeled data to capture class-specific features, limiting the application of deep learning-based methods while there are a few labeled training samples. An unsupervised deep learning representation, high-resolution remote sensing image scene classification method is proposed in this work to address this issue. The proposed method, called contrastive learning, narrows the distance between positive views: color channels belonging to the same images widens the gaps between negative view pairs consisting of color channels from different images to obtain class-specific data representations of the input data without any supervised information. The classifier uses extracted features by the convolutional neural network (CNN)-based feature extractor with labeled information of training data to set space of each category and then, using linear regression, makes predictions in the testing procedure. Comparing with existing unsupervised deep learning representation high-resolution remote sensing image scene classification methods, contrastive learning CNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on three different scale benchmark data sets: small scale RSSCN7 data set, midscale aerial image data set, and large-scale NWPU-RESISC45 data set.