Title: Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification: Benchmark and State of the Art,
Abstract: Remote sensing image scene classification plays an important role in a wide
range of applications and hence has been receiving remarkable attention. During
the past years, significant efforts have been made to develop various datasets
or present a variety of approaches for scene classification from remote sensing
images. However, a systematic review of the literature concerning datasets and
methods for scene classification is still lacking. In addition, almost all
existing datasets have a number of limitations, including the small scale of
scene classes and the image numbers, the lack of image variations and
diversity, and the saturation of accuracy. These limitations severely limit the
development of new approaches especially deep learning-based methods. This
paper first provides a comprehensive review of the recent progress. Then, we
propose a large-scale dataset, termed "NWPU-RESISC45", which is a publicly
available benchmark for REmote Sensing Image Scene Classification (RESISC),
created by Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU). This dataset contains
31,500 images, covering 45 scene classes with 700 images in each class. The
proposed NWPU-RESISC45 (i) is large-scale on the scene classes and the total
image number, (ii) holds big variations in translation, spatial resolution,
viewpoint, object pose, illumination, background, and occlusion, and (iii) has
high within-class diversity and between-class similarity. The creation of this
dataset will enable the community to develop and evaluate various data-driven
algorithms. Finally, several representative methods are evaluated using the
proposed dataset and the results are reported as a useful baseline for future
research.