Convolutional neural network based heterogeneous transfer learning for remote-sensing scene classification

Deep convolutional neural network (CNN) transfer has recently shown strong performance in scene classification of high-resolution remote-sensing images. However, the majority of transfer learning solutions are categorized as homogeneous transfer learning, which ignores differences between target and source domains. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous model to transfer CNNs to remote-sensing scene classification to correct input feature differences between target and source datasets. First, we extract filters from source images using the principal component analysis (PCA) method. Next, we convolute the target images with the extracted PCA filters to obtain an adopted target dataset. Then, a pretrained CNN is transferred to the adopted target dataset as a feature extractor. Finally, a classifier is used to accomplish remote-sensing scene classification. We conducted extensive experiments on the UC Merced dataset, the Brazilian coffee scene dataset and the Aerial Images Dataset to verify the effectiveness of the proposed heterogeneous model. The experimental results show that the proposed heterogeneous model outperforms the homogeneous model that uses pretrained CNNs as feature extractors by a wide margin and gains similar accuracies by fine-tuning a homogeneous transfer learning model with few training iterations.