The spatial distribution of remote-sensing scene images is highly complex in character, so how to extract local key semantic information and discriminative features is the key to making it possible to classify accurately. However, most of the existing convolutional neural network (CNN) models tend to have global feature representations and lose the shallow features. In addition, when the network is too deep, gradient disappearance and overfitting tend to occur. To solve these problems, a lightweight, multi-instance CNN model for remote sensing scene classification is proposed in this paper: MILRDA. In the instance extraction and classifier part, more discriminative features are extracted by the constructed residual dense attention block (RDAB) while retaining shallow features. Then, the extracted features are transformed into instance-level vectors and the local information associated with bag-level labels is highlighted by the proposed channel-attention-based multi-instance pooling, while suppressing the weights of useless objects or backgrounds. Finally, the network is constrained by the cross-entropy loss function to output the final prediction results. The experimental results on four public datasets show that our proposed method can achieve comparable results to other state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the visualization of feature maps shows that MILRDA can find more effective features.

Due to the rapid development of satellite technology, high‐spatial‐resolution remote sensing (HRRS) images have highly complex spatial distributions and multiscale features, making the classification of such images a challenging task. The key to scene classification is to accurately understand the main semantic information contained in images. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have outstanding advantages in this field. Deep CNNs (D‐CNNs) with better performance tend to have more parameters and higher complexity. However, shallow CNNs have difficulty extracting the key features of complex remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a lightweight network with a random depth strategy for remote sensing scene classification (LRSCM). We construct a convolutional feature extraction module, DCAB, which incorporates depthwise separable convolutional and inverted residual structures, effectively reducing the numbers of required parameters and computations, and retains and utilizes low‐level features. In addition, coordinate attention (CA) is integrated into the module, thereby further improving the network's ability to extract key local information. To further reduce the complexity of model training, the residual module adopts a stochastic depth strategy, providing the network with a random depth. Comparative experiments on five public datasets show that the LRSCM network can achieve results comparable to those of other state‐of‐the‐art methods.