Many aerial images with similar appearances have different but correlated scene labels， which causes the label ambiguity. Label distribution learning (LDL) can express label ambiguity by giving each sample a label distribution. Thus, a sample contributes to the learning of its ground-truth label as well as correlated labels, which improve data utilization. LDL has gained success in many fields, such as age estimation, in which label ambiguity can be easily modeled on the basis of the prior knowledge about local sample similarity and global label correlations. However, LDL has never been applied to scene classification, because there is no knowledge about the local similarity and label correlations and thus it is hard to model label ambiguity. In this paper, we uncover the sample neighbors that cause label ambiguity by jointly capturing the local similarity and label correlations and propose neighbor-based LDL (N-LDL) for aerial scene classification. We define a subspace learning problem, which formulates the neighboring relations as a coefficient matrix that is regularized by a sparse constraint and label correlations. The sparse constraint provides a few nearest neighbors, which captures local similarity. The label correlations are predefined according to the confusion matrices on validation sets. During subspace learning, the neighboring relations are encouraged to agree with the label correlations, which ensures that the uncovered neighbors have correlated labels. Finally, the label propagation among the neighbors forms the label distributions, which leads to label smoothing in terms of label ambiguity. The label distributions are used to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Experiments on the aerial image dataset (AID) and NWPU_RESISC45 (NR) datasets demonstrate that using the label distributions clearly improves the classification performance by assisting feature learning and mitigating over-fitting problems, and our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
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