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With the rapid development of various satellite sensors, automatic and advanced scene classification technique is urgently needed to process a huge amount of satellite image data. Recently, a few of research works start to implant the sparse coding for feature learning in aerial scene classification. However, these previous research works use the single-layer sparse coding in their system and their performances are highly related with multiple low-level features, such as scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) and saliency. Motivated by the importance of feature learning through multiple layers, we propose a new unsupervised feature learning approach for scene classification on very high resolution satellite imagery. The proposed unsupervised feature learning utilizes multipath sparse coding architecture in order to capture multiple aspects of discriminative structures within complex satellite scene images. In addition, the dense low-level features are extracted from the raw satellite data by using different image patches with varying size at different layers, and this approach is not limited to a particularly designed feature descriptors compared with the other related works. The proposed technique has been evaluated on two challenging high-resolution datasets, including the UC Merced dataset containing 21 different aerial scene categories with a 1 foot resolution and the Singapore dataset containing 5 land-use categories with a 0.5m spatial resolution. Experimental results show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art that uses the single-layer sparse coding. The major contributions of this proposed technique include (1) a new unsupervised feature learning approach to generate feature representation for very high-resolution satellite imagery, (2) the first multipath sparse coding that is used for scene classification in very high-resolution satellite imagery, (3) a simple low-level feature descriptor instead of many particularly designed low-level descriptor, such as SIFT descriptors and saliency, (4) evaluation on two satellite image datasets that come from different sensor sources.
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