Scene classification based on single-layer SAE and SVM

• The SAE and SVM based scene classification method achieves excellent performance.
• A single-layer SAE is proposed to extract sufficient and appropriate features.
• A mean-pooling operation is proposed to reduce the dimension of feature vectors.
• A PSO-based algorithm is employed to optimize the parameters for the SVM classifier.

Scene classification aims to group images into semantic categories. It is a challenging problem in computer vision due to the difficulties of intra-class variability and inter-class similarity. In this paper, a scene classification approach based on single-layer sparse autoencoder (SAE) and support vector machine (SVM) is proposed. This approach consists of two steps: SAE-based feature learning step and SVM-based classification step. In the first step, a single-layer SAE network is constructed and trained by the patches which are sampled randomly from the source images. The feature representation of images is learned by the trained single-layer SAE network. Meanwhile, a pooling operation is used to reduce the dimension of the learned feature vectors. In the second step, in order to improve the classification accuracy, the parameters of SVM are optimized by a particle swarm optimization (PSO) based algorithm. The one-versus-one strategy is employed for the multiple scene classification problem. To show the efficiency of the proposed approach, several public data sets are employed. The results reveal that the proposed approach achieves better classification accuracy than the existing state-of-the-art methods.