Improved Prototypical Networks for Remote Sensing Scene Classification

In practical applications, remote sensing (RS) scene classification faces data shift problems, including novel class and data discrepancy problems. Due to these problems, it is difficult to obtain representative and discriminative features. Therefore, we propose improved prototypical networks (IPN) based on few-shot learning to solve data shift problems in RS scene classification. First, a novel and effective scheme is proposed, which is to introduce Vision Transformer (ViT) pre-trained on a large-scale dataset as the feature extractor of the prototypical networks. Based on the meta-task training framework, IPN can adapt well to RS scene classification tasks and obtain representative features. In addition, a novel loss function called self-distillation-based prototype loss is designed to obtain discriminative features by introducing inter-sample self-distillation and inter-layer self-distillation methods. Extensive experiments are conducted on several public RS scene datasets. Compared with the existing methods, the proposed method achieves an improvement of 4.18%-21.42%. Results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively solve the data shift problems in RS scene classification.