Hierarchical Multi-View Semi-Supervised Learning for Very High-Resolution Remote Sensing Image Classification

Traditional classification methods used for very high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing images require a large number of labeled samples to obtain higher classification accuracy. Labeled samples are difficult to obtain and costly. Therefore, semi-supervised learning becomes an effective paradigm that combines the labeled and unlabeled samples for classification. In semi-supervised learning, the key issue is to enlarge the training set by selecting highly-reliable unlabeled samples. Observing the samples from multiple views is helpful to improving the accuracy of label prediction for unlabeled samples. Hence, the reasonable view partition is very important for improving the classification performance. In this paper, a hierarchical multi-view semi-supervised learning framework with CNNs (HMVSSL) is proposed for VHR remote sensing image classification. Firstly, a superpixel-based sample enlargement method is proposed to increase the number of training samples in each view. Secondly, a view partition method is designed to partition the training set into two independent views, and the partitioned subsets are characterized by being inter-distinctive and intra-compact. Finally, a collaborative classification strategy is proposed for the final classification. Experiments are conducted on three VHR remote sensing images, and the results show that the proposed method performs better than several state-of-the-art methods.