Self-supervised embedding for generalized zero-shot learning in remote sensing scene classification

Generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) is the most popular approach for developing ZSL, which involves both seen and unseen classes in the classification process. Many of the existing GZSL approaches for scene classification in remote sensing images use word embeddings that do not effectively describe unseen categories. We explore word embedding to describe the classes of remote sensing scenes to improve the classification accuracy of unseen categories. The proposed method uses a data2vec embedding based on self-supervised learning to obtain a continuous and contextualized latent representation. This representation leverages two advantages of the standard transformer architecture. First, targets are not predefined as visual tokens. Second, latent representations preserve contextual information. We conducted experiments on three benchmark scene classification datasets of remote sensing images. The proposed approach demonstrates its efficacy over the existing GZSL approaches.