Scene Classification via a Gradient Boosting Random Convolutional Network Framework

Due to the recent advances in satellite sensors, a large amount of high-resolution remote sensing images is now being obtained each day. How to automatically recognize and analyze scenes from these satellite images effectively and efficiently has become a big challenge in the remote sensing field. Recently, a lot of work in scene classification has been proposed, focusing on deep neural networks, which learn hierarchical internal feature representations from image data sets and produce state-of-the-art performance. However, most methods, including the traditional shallow methods and deep neural networks, only concentrate on training a single model. Meanwhile, neural network ensembles have proved to be a powerful and practical tool for a number of different predictive tasks. Can we find a way to combine different deep neural networks effectively and efficiently for scene classification? In this paper, we propose a gradient boosting random convolutional network (GBRCN) framework for scene classification, which can effectively combine many deep neural networks. As far as we know, this is the first time that a deep ensemble framework has been proposed for scene classification. Moreover, in the experiments, the proposed method was applied to two challenging high-resolution data sets: 1) the UC Merced data set containing 21 different aerial scene categories with a submeter resolution and 2) a Sydney data set containing eight land-use categories with a 1.0-m spatial resolution. The proposed GBRCN framework outperformed the state-of-the-art methods with the UC Merced data set, including the traditional single convolutional network approach. For the Sydney data set, the proposed method again obtained the best accuracy, demonstrating that the proposed framework can provide more accurate classification results than the state-of-the-art methods.