  Classification of very high resolution (VHR) satellite images has three major
challenges: 1) inherent low intra-class and high inter-class spectral
similarities, 2) mismatching resolution of available bands, and 3) the need to
regularize noisy classification maps. Conventional methods have addressed these
challenges by adopting separate stages of image fusion, feature extraction, and
post-classification map regularization. These processing stages, however, are
not jointly optimizing the classification task at hand. In this study, we
propose a single-stage framework embedding the processing stages in a recurrent
multiresolution convolutional network trained in an end-to-end manner. The
feedforward version of the network, called FuseNet, aims to match the
resolution of the panchromatic and multispectral bands in a VHR image using
convolutional layers with corresponding downsampling and upsampling operations.
Contextual label information is incorporated into FuseNet by means of a
recurrent version called ReuseNet. We compared FuseNet and ReuseNet against the
use of separate processing steps for both image fusion, e.g. pansharpening and
resampling through interpolation, and map regularization such as conditional
random fields. We carried out our experiments on a land cover classification
task using a Worldview-03 image of Quezon City, Philippines and the ISPRS 2D
semantic labeling benchmark dataset of Vaihingen, Germany. FuseNet and ReuseNet
surpass the baseline approaches in both quantitative and qualitative results.
