Teacher-Student Prototype Enhancement Network for a Few-Shot Remote Sensing Scene Classification

Few-shot remote sensing scene classification identifies new classes from limited labeled samples where the great challenges are intraclass diversity, interclass similarity, and limited supervision. To alleviate these problems, a teacher-student prototype enhancement network is proposed for a few-shot remote sensing scene classification. Instead of introducing an attentional mechanism in mainstream studies, a prototype enhancement module is recommended to adaptively select high-confidence query samples, which can enhance the support prototype representations to emphasize intraclass and interclass relationships. The construction of a few-shot teacher model generates more discriminative predictive representations with inputs from many labeled samples, thus providing a strong supervisory signal to the student model and encouraging the network to achieve accurate classification with a limited number of labeled samples. Extensive experiments of four public datasets, including NWPU-remote sens ing image scene classification (NWPU-RESISC45), aerial image dataset (AID), UC Merced, and WHU-RS19, demonstrate that this method achieves superior competitive performance than the state-of-the-art methods on five-way, one-shot, and five-shot classifications.