Lifelong Learning for Scene Recognition in Remote Sensing Images

The development of visual sensing technologies has made it possible to obtain some high resolution and to gather many high-resolution satellite images. To make the best use of these images, it is essential to be able to recognize and retrieve their intrinsic scene information. The problem of scene recognition in remote sensing images has recently aroused considerable interest, mainly due to the great success achieved by deep learning methods in generic image classification. Nevertheless, such methods usually require large amounts of labeled data. By contrast, remote sensing images are relatively scarce and expensive to obtain. Moreover, data sets from different aerospace research institutions exhibit large disparities. In order to address these problems, we propose a model based on a meta-learning method with the ability of learning a classifier from just few-shot samples. With the proposed model, the knowledge learned from one data set can be easily adapted to a new data set, which, in turn, would serve in the lifelong few-shot learning. Scene-level image recognition experiments, on public high-resolution remote sensing image data sets, validate our proposed lifelong few-shot learning model.