GAN-Based Semisupervised Scene Classification of Remote Sensing Image

With the advent of a large number of remote sensing images (RSIs), scene classification of RSI is widely applied to many fields such as urban planning, natural disaster detection, and environmental monitoring. Compared with the natural image field, the lack of labeled RSI is a bottleneck of supervised scene classification methods based on deep learning. Meanwhile, unsupervised scene classification is difficult to meet actual needs. To this end, we propose a novel semisupervised scene classification method for RSI using generative adversarial nets (GANs), in which a gating unit, a self-attention gating (SAG) module, and a pretrained Inception V3 branch are introduced into discriminative network to enhance the feature representation capability for facilitating semisupervised classification. To be specific, the gating unit aims to learn the weights of each feature map and capture the dependence relationship between features. The SAG module aims to capture a long-range dependence for adaptively focusing on important scene regions. The Inception V3 branch aims to extract the high-level semantic representation of input images and further enhance the discriminant ability by gating unit and SAG module. Furthermore, a new optimization term is incorporated into the generator loss to indirectly drive discriminator to correctly classify scene images. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, extensive experimental results on UC Merced and EuroSAT data sets demonstrate that the method surpasses most of the state-of-the-art semisupervised image classification methods significantly, especially when only few samples are tagged.