SDLS: A Two-Stream Architecture with Self-Distillation and Local Streams for Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification

Remote sensing image scene classification holds significant application value and has long been a research hotspot in remote sensing. However, remote sensing images contain diverse objects and complex backgrounds. Reducing background interference while focusing on key target regions in the images remains a challenge, which limits the potential improvement of classification accuracy. In this paper, a local image generation module (LIGM) is proposed to generate weights for the original images. The resulting local images, generated by weighting the original images, effectively focus on key target regions while suppressing background regions. Based on the LIGM, a two-stream architecture with self-distillation and local streams (SDLS) is proposed. The self-distillation stream extracts features from the original images using a convolutional neural network (CNN) and two MobileNetV2 networks. Furthermore, a multiplex-guided attention (MGA) module is introduced into this stream to facilitate cross-network attention-guided learning between the CNN and MobileNetV2 features. In the local stream, a MobileNetV2 network is employed to extract features from the local images. The classification logits produced by the two streams are fused, resulting in the final SDLS classification score. Experimental results demonstrate that SDLS achieves competitive performance on multiple datasets.