  This paper introduces the use of single layer and deep convolutional networks
for remote sensing data analysis. Direct application to multi- and
hyper-spectral imagery of supervised (shallow or deep) convolutional networks
is very challenging given the high input data dimensionality and the relatively
small amount of available labeled data. Therefore, we propose the use of greedy
layer-wise unsupervised pre-training coupled with a highly efficient algorithm
for unsupervised learning of sparse features. The algorithm is rooted on sparse
representations and enforces both population and lifetime sparsity of the
extracted features, simultaneously. We successfully illustrate the expressive
power of the extracted representations in several scenarios: classification of
aerial scenes, as well as land-use classification in very high resolution
(VHR), or land-cover classification from multi- and hyper-spectral images. The
proposed algorithm clearly outperforms standard Principal Component Analysis
(PCA) and its kernel counterpart (kPCA), as well as current state-of-the-art
algorithms of aerial classification, while being extremely computationally
efficient at learning representations of data. Results show that single layer
convolutional networks can extract powerful discriminative features only when
the receptive field accounts for neighboring pixels, and are preferred when the
classification requires high resolution and detailed results. However, deep
architectures significantly outperform single layers variants, capturing
increasing levels of abstraction and complexity throughout the feature
hierarchy.
