Graph-Based Embedding Smoothing Network for Few-Shot Scene Classification of Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

As a fundamental task in the field of remote sensing, scene classification is increasingly attracting attention. The most popular way to solve scene classification is to train a deep neural network with a large-scale remote sensing dataset. However, given a small amount of data, how to train a deep neural network with outstanding performance remains a challenge. Existing methods seek to take advantage of transfer knowledge or meta-knowledge to resolve the scene classification issue of remote sensing images with a handful of labeled samples while ignoring various class-irrelevant noises existing in scene features and the specificity of different tasks. For this reason, in this paper, an end-to-end graph neural network is presented to enhance the performance of scene classification in few-shot scenarios, referred to as the graph-based embedding smoothing network (GES-Net). Specifically, GES-Net adopts an unsupervised non-parametric regularizer, called embedding smoothing, to regularize embedding features. Embedding smoothing can capture high-order feature interactions in an unsupervised manner, which is adopted to remove undesired noises from embedding features and yields smoother embedding features. Moreover, instead of the traditional sample-level relation representation, GES-Net introduces a new task-level relation representation to construct the graph. The task-level relation representation can capture the relations between nodes from the perspective of the whole task rather than only between samples, which can highlight subtle differences between nodes and enhance the discrimination of the relations between nodes. Experimental results on three public remote sensing datasets, UC Merced, WHU-RS19, and NWPU-RESISC45, showed that the proposed GES-Net approach obtained state-of-the-art results in the settings of limited labeled samples.