Variational Self-Distillation for Remote Sensing Scene Classification

Supported by deep learning techniques, remote sensing scene classification, a fundamental task in remote image analysis, has recently obtained remarkable progress. However, due to the severe uncertainty and perturbation within an image, it is still a challenging task and remains many unsolved problems. In this article, we note that regular one-hot labels cannot precisely describe remote sensing images, and they fail to provide enough information for supervision and limiting the discriminative feature learning of the network. To solve this problem, we propose a variational self-distillation network (VSDNet), in which the class entanglement information from the prediction vector acts as the supplement to the category information. Then, the exploited information is hierarchically distilled from the deep layers into the shallow parts via a variational knowledge transfer (VKT) module. Notably, the VKT module performs knowledge distillation in a probabilistic way through variational estimation, which enables end-to-end optimization for mutual information and promotes robustness to uncertainty within the image. Extensive experiments on four challenging remote sensing datasets demonstrate that, with a negligible parameter increase, the proposed VSDNet brings a significant performance improvement over different backbone networks and delivers state-of-the-art results.