Classification of high resolution urban remote sensing images using deep networks by integration of social media photos

In recent decades, it is easy to obtain remote sensing images which have been successfully applied to various applications, such as urban planning, hazard monitoring, etc. In particular, high resolution (HR) remote sensing (RS) images can better monitor our living environment from a broader spatial perspective. However, raw remote sensing images provide no labeling information to train a classifier, which usually is exploited to generate remote sensing maps. Based on our previous work, in the paper, an automatic classification system is proposed to classify high resolution urban RS images using deep neural networks, in particular, convolutional neural networks and fully convolutional networks. The labeling information is assigned on the context of both social media photos and HR remote sensing images by significantly reducing the cost of manual labeling without the necessity of remote sensing experts. The experiments carried out on high resolution remote sensing images acquired in the city Frankfurt taken by the Jilin-1 satellites confirm the effectiveness of the proposed strategy compared to the state of the art.