Satellite and Scene Image Classification Based on Transfer Learning and Fine Tuning of ResNet50

Image classification has gained lot of attention due to its application in different computer vision tasks such as remote sensing, scene analysis, surveillance, object detection, and image retrieval. The primary goal of image classification is to assign the class labels to images according to the image contents. The applications of image classification and image analysis in remote sensing are important as they are used in various applied domains such as military and civil fields. Earlier approaches for remote sensing images and scene analysis are based on low-level feature representations such as color- and texture-based features. Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD) and orderless Bag-of-Features (BoF) representations are the examples of mid-level approaches for remote sensing image classification. Recent trends for remote sensing and scene classification are focused on the use of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Keeping in view the success of CNN models, in this research, we aim to fine-tune ResNet50 by using network surgery and creation of network head along with the fine-tuning of hyperparameters. The learning of hyperparameters is tuned by using a linear decay learning rate scheduler known as piecewise scheduler. To tune the optimizer hyperparameter, Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum (SGDM) is used with the usage of weight learn and bias learn rate factor. Experiments and analysis are conducted on five different datasets, that is, UC Merced Land Use Dataset (UCM), RSSCN (the remote sensing scene classification image dataset), SIRI-WHU, Corel-1K, and Corel-1.5K. The analysis and competitive results exemplify that our proposed image classification-based model can classify the images in a more effective and efficient manner as compared to the state-of-the-art research.