Remote Sensing, Vol. 14, Pages 4824: A General Self-Supervised Framework for Remote Sensing Image Classification (Remote Sensing)

This paper provides insights into the interpretation beyond simply combining self-supervised learning (SSL) with remote sensing (RS). Inspired by the improved representation ability brought by SSL in natural image understanding, we aim to explore and analyze the compatibility of SSL with remote sensing. In particular, we propose a self-supervised pre-training framework for the first time by applying the masked image modeling (MIM) method to RS image research in order to enhance its efficacy. The completion proxy task used by MIM encourages the model to reconstruct the masked patches, and thus correlate the unseen parts with the seen parts in semantics. Second, in order to figure out how pretext tasks affect downstream performance, we find the attribution consensus of the pre-trained model and downstream tasks toward the proxy and classification targets, which is quite different from that in natural image understanding. Moreover, this transferable consensus is persistent in cross-dataset full or partial fine-tuning, which means that SSL could boost general model-free representation beyond domain bias and task bias (e.g., classification, segmentation, and detection). Finally, on three publicly accessible RS scene classification datasets, our method outperforms the majority of fully supervised state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods with higher accuracy scores on unlabeled datasets.