NaSC-TG2: Natural Scene Classification with Tiangong-2 Remotely Sensed Imagery

Scene classification is one of the most important applications of remote sensing. Researchers have proposed various datasets and innovative methods for remote sensing scene classification in recent years. However, most of the existing remote sensing scene datasets are collected uniquely from a single data source: Google Earth. In addition, scenes in different datasets are mainly human-made landscapes with high similarity. The lack of richness and diversity of data sources limits the research and applications of remote sensing classification. This article describes a large-scale dataset named “NaSC-TG2,” which is a novel benchmark dataset for remote sensing natural scene classification built from Tiangong-2 remotely sensed imagery. The goal of this dataset is to expand and enrich the annotation data for advancing remote sensing classification algorithms, especially for the natural scene classification. The dataset contains 20 000 images, which are equally divided into ten scene classes. The dataset has three primary advantages: 1) it is large scale, especially in terms of the number of each class, and the numbers of scenes are evenly distributed; 2) it has a large number of intraclass differences and high interclass similarity, because all images are carefully selected from different regions and seasons; and 3) it offers natural scenes with novel spatial scale and imaging performance compared with other datasets. All images are acquired from the new generation of wideband imaging spectrometer of Tiangong-2. In addition to RGB images, the corresponding multispectral scene images are also provided. This dataset is useful in supporting the development and evaluation of classification algorithms, as demonstrated in the present study.