SUPERPIXEL CLASSIFICATION OF HIGH SPATIAL RESOLUTION REMOTE SENSING IMAGE BASED ON MULTI-SCALE CNN AND SCALE PARAMETER ESTIMATION

Abstract. In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to integrate convolutional neural network (CNN) with land cover classification of high spatial resolution remote sensing image. Per-pixel classification method based on CNN (Per-pixel CNN) achieved higher accuracy with the help of high-level features, however, this method still has limitations. Even though per-superpixel classification method based on CNN (Per-superpixel CNN) overcome the limitations of per-pixel CNN, classification accuracy of complex urban is easily influenced by scale effect. To solve this issue, superpixel classification method combining multi-scale CNN (Per-superpixel MCNN) method is proposed. Besides, this paper proposes a novel spatial statistics based method to estimate applicable scale parameter of per-superpixel CNN. Experiments using proposed method were performed on Digital Orthophoto Quarer Quad (DOQQ) images in urban and suburban area. Classification results show that per-superpixel MCNN can effectively avoid misclassification in complex urban area compared with per-superpixel classification method combining single-scale CNN (Per-superpixel SCNN). Series of classification results also show that using the pre-estimated scale parameter can guarantee high classification accuracy, thus arbitrary nature of scale estimation can be avoided to some extent.