Land-Use Scene Classification Using a Concentric Circle-Structured Multiscale Bag-of-Visual-Words Model

High-resolution remote sensing image-based land-use scene classification is a difficult task, which is to recognize the semantic category of a given land-use scene image based on priori knowledge. Land-use scenes often cover multiple land-cover classes or ground objects, which makes a scene very complex and difficult to represent and recognize. To deal with this problem, this paper applies the well-known bag-of-visual-words (BOVWs) model which has been very successful in natural image scene classification. Moreover, many existing BOVW methods only use scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) features to construct visual vocabularies, lacking in investigation of other features or feature combinations, and they are also sensitive to the rotation of image scenes. Therefore, this paper presents a concentric circle-based spatial-rotation-invariant representation strategy for describing spatial information of visual words and proposes a concentric circle-structured multiscale BOVW method using multiple features for land-use scene classification. Experiments on public land-use scene classification datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to many existing BOVW methods and is very suitable to solve the land-use scene classification problem.