Fully Connected Conditional Radom Fields for High Resolution Remote Sensing Land Use/Land Cover Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks
The interpretation of land use/land cover (LULC) is a hotspot and difficult issue in the field of high resolution remote sensing image processing as well as land resource management. Training a new (or existing) Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) architecture fully for LULC classification needs a large amount of remote sensing images. Thus, fine-tuning a pre-trained CNNs for LULC is acceptable. To improve the classification accuracy for high resolution remote sensing images, it is necessary to utilize some hand-crafted features and adopt a classifier for post-processing. A Fully Connected Conditional Radom Fields (FC-CRFs), to utilize the fine-tuned CNNs layers, hand-crafted features and fully connected pairwise potentials, is proposed for image classification of high resolution remote sensing images. First, an existing CNNs model is adopted, and the parameters of CNNs are fine-tuned by training datasets. Then, the probabilities of image pixels belong to each class type also could be calculated. Second, we consider the hand-craft features, combined with Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, the probabilities belong to each LULC class type are achieved. Combined with the probabilities achieved by fine-tuned CNNs, new feature descriptors are built. Finally, FC-CRFs are introduced to get the classification results, while the unary potentials are achieved by the new feature descriptors and SVM classifier, and the pairwise potentials are achieved by the hand-crafted features. Experimental results show that the proposed classification scheme can achieve impressive performance when the total accuracy reached to about 85%.