EDense: a convolutional neural network with ELM-based dense connections

The explosive growth of geospatial data is increasing requirements for automatic and efficient data learning abilities. Many deep learning methods have been widely applied for geospatial data understanding tasks, such as road networks and geospatial object detection. However, the demands for more accurate learning of high-level features require the use of deeper neural networks. To further improve the learning efficiency of deep neural networks, in this paper, we propose an improved convolutional neural network named EDense. First, we use its dense connectivity to integrate a CNN with an extreme learning machine. Then, we expand the kernels in the convolutional layers to increase the width of the network model. Furthermore, we propose one-feature EDense (OF-EDense), which is a simplified version of EDense, to fit conditions in which the number of parameters is strictly limited. Finally, the experimental results fully demonstrate the strong learning ability and high learning efficiency of EDense.