In-Domain Self-Supervised Learning Can Lead to Improvements in Remote Sensing Image Classification

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising approach for remote sensing image classification due to its ability to leverage large amounts of unlabeled data. In contrast to traditional supervised learning, SSL aims to learn representations of data without the need for explicit labels. This is achieved by formulating auxiliary tasks that can be used to create pseudo-labels for the unlabeled data and learn pre-trained models. The pre-trained models can then be fine-tuned on downstream tasks such as remote sensing image scene classification. The paper analyzes the effectiveness of SSL pre-training using Million AID - a large unlabeled remote sensing dataset on various remote sensing image scene classification datasets as downstream tasks. More specifically, we evaluate the effectiveness of SSL pre-training using the iBOT framework coupled with Vision transformers (ViT) in contrast to supervised pre-training of ViT using the ImageNet dataset. The comprehensive experimental work across 14 datasets with diverse properties reveals that in-domain SSL leads to improved predictive performance of models compared to the supervised counterparts.