Aerial Image Classification with Label Splitting and Optimized Triplet Loss Learning

With the development of airplane platforms, aerial image classification plays an important role in a wide range of remote sensing applications. The number of most of aerial image dataset is very limited compared with other computer vision datasets. Unlike many works that use data augmentation to solve this problem, we adopt a novel strategy, called, label splitting, to deal with limited samples. Specifically, each sample has its original semantic label, we assign a new appearance label via unsupervised clustering for each sample by label splitting. Then an optimized triplet loss learning is applied to distill domain specific knowledge. This is achieved through a binary tree forest partitioning and triplets selection and optimization scheme that controls the triplet quality. Simulation results on NWPU, UCM and AID datasets demonstrate that proposed solution achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the aerial image classification.