Class-Incremental Novel Category Discovery in Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification via Contrastive Learning

Remote sensing (RS) imagery captures the earth’s ever-changing landscapes, reflecting evolving land cover patterns propelled by natural processes and human activities. However, existing RS scene classification methods mainly operate under a closed-set hypothesis, which stumbles when encountering novel emerging scenes. This article addresses the intricate task of RS scene classification without labels for novel scenes under incremental learning, termed class-incremental novel category discovery. We propose a contrastive learning-based novel category discovery pipeline tailored for RS image scene classification, enhancing the ability to learn unlabeled novel class data. Furthermore, within this pipeline, we introduce a positive pair filter to identify more positive sample pairs from novel classes, improving the feature representation capability on unlabeled data. Besides, our contrastive learning pipeline incorporates an old-feature replaying method to alleviate catastrophic forgetting in old classes. Extensive evaluations across three public RS datasets showcase the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art approaches.