Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have performed well in object classification and object recognition. However, due to the particularity of geographic data, the labeled samples are seriously insufficient, which limits the practical application of CNN methods in remote sensing (RS) image processing. To address the problem of small sample RS image classification, a discrete wavelet-based multi-level deep feature fusion method is proposed. First, the deep features are extracted from the RS images using pre-trained deep CNNs and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) methods. Next, a modified discriminant correlation analysis (DCA) approach is proposed to distinguish easily confused categories effectively, which is based on the distance coefficient of between-class. The proposed approach can effectively integrate the deep feature information of various frequency bands. Thereby, the proposed method obtains the low-dimensional features with good discrimination, which is demonstrated through experiments on four benchmark datasets. Compared with several state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method achieves outstanding performance under limited training samples, especially one or two training samples per class.
Keywords: deep feature fusion; discrete wavelet transform; discriminant correlation analysis; remote sensing scene classification.