Diffusion Self-Distillation for Remote Sensing Scene Classification

Remote sensing scene classification, a fundamental task in remote image analysis, has obtained rapid progress due to the powerful capabilities of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Achieving precise classification performance heavily relies on the feature extraction capacity of the network. However, due to the large variation and severe distortion within the images, extracting robust feature representations is necessary but challenging. Self-distillation could enhance the shallow layers by providing stronger gradients and more accurate supervision from deeper layers, thereby promoting the extraction of spatially detailed features. Nonetheless, due to the limited capacity of shallow layers to learn truly valuable knowledge, shallow layer features can be viewed as the noisy version of deep layer features and contain more disruptive factors, which significantly impedes the effectiveness of self-distillation. To address this issue, in this article, we establish the diffusion self-distillation network (DSDNet), which incorporates the conditional diffusion denoising model into the self-distillation framework. Specifically, DSDNet filters noise from shallow features through the diffusion denoising process, enabling more precise and accurate distillation between the refined student features and the teacher features. Extensive experiments on four challenging remote sensing datasets demonstrate that the proposed DSDNet achieves significant performance improvements over various backbone networks with negligible increases in parameters, delivering state-of-the-art classification performance.