We explore the use of convolutional neural networks for the semantic classification of remote sensing scenes. Two recently proposed architectures, CaffeNet and GoogLeNet, are adopted, with three different learning modalities. Besides conventional training from scratch, we resort to pre-trained networks that are only fine-tuned on the target data, so as to avoid overfitting problems and reduce design time. Experiments on two remote sensing datasets, with markedly different characteristics, testify on the effectiveness and wide applicability of the proposed solution, which guarantees a significant performance improvement over all state-of-the-art references.
In the last few years, there has been intense research on remote sensing scene classification, focusing both on the use of suitable image descriptors and of a proper classification task. Local descriptors, in fact, like local binary patterns (LBP) @cite_21 , scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) @cite_59 , or histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) @cite_42 , with their invariance to geometric and photometric transformations, have proven effective in a variety of computer vision applications, especially object recognition. They can be extracted both in sparse (keypoint-based) and dense way. In any case, given the high dimensionality of the feature space, they need a subsequent coding phase in order to obtain an expressive but compact representation of the image.
@cite_21 @cite_42 @cite_59
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Object detection in very high resolution (VHR) optical remote sensing images is one of the most fundamental but challenging problems in the field of remote sensing image analysis. As object detection is usually carried out in feature space, effective feature representation is very important to construct a high-performance object detection system. During the last decades, a great deal of effort has been made to develop various feature representations for the detection of different types of objects. Among various features developed for visual object detection, the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) feature is maybe one of the most popular features that has been successfully applied to computer vision community. However, although the HOG feature has achieved great success in nature scene images, it is problematic to directly use it for object detection in optical remote sensing images because it is difficult to effectively handle the problem of object rotation variations. To explore a possible solution to the problem, this paper proposes a novel method to learn rotation-invariant HOG (RIHOG) features for object detection in optical remote sensing images. This is achieved by learning a rotation-invariant transformation model via optimizing a new objective function, which constrains the training samples before and after rotation to share the similar features to achieve rotation-invariance. In the experiments, we evaluate the proposed method on a publicly available 10-class VHR geospatial object detection dataset and comprehensive comparisons with state-of-the-arts demonstrate the effectiveness the proposed method. We introduce a new framework for image classification that extends beyond the window sampling of fixed spatial pyramids to include a comprehensive set of windows densely sampled over location, size and aspect ratio. To effectively deal with this large set of windows, we derive a concise high-level image feature using a two-level extraction method. At the first level, window-based features are computed from local descriptors (e.g., SIFT, spatial HOG, LBP) in a process similar to standard feature extractors. Then at the second level, the new image feature is determined from the window-based features in a manner analogous to the first level. This higher level of abstraction offers both efficient handling of dense samples and reduced sensitivity to misalignment. More importantly, our simple yet effective framework can readily accommodate a large number of existing pooling coding methods, allowing them to extract features beyond the spatial pyramid representation. To effectively fuse the second level feature with a standard first level image feature for classification, we additionally propose a new learning algorithm, called Generalized Adaptive lp-norm Multiple Kernel Learning (GA-MKL), to learn an adapted robust classifier based on multiple base kernels constructed from image features and multiple sets of pre-learned classifiers of all the classes. Extensive evaluation on the object recognition (Caltech256) and scene recognition (15Scenes) benchmark datasets demonstrates that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art image classification algorithms under a broad range of settings. Local or global rotation invariant feature extraction has been widely used in texture classification. Local invariant features, e.g. local binary pattern (LBP), have the drawback of losing global spatial information, while global features preserve little local texture information. This paper proposes an alternative hybrid scheme, globally rotation invariant matching with locally variant LBP texture features. Using LBP distribution, we first estimate the principal orientations of the texture image and then use them to align LBP histograms. The aligned histograms are then in turn used to measure the dissimilarity between images. A new texture descriptor, LBP variance (LBPV), is proposed to characterize the local contrast information into the one-dimensional LBP histogram. LBPV does not need any quantization and it is totally training-free. To further speed up the proposed matching scheme, we propose a method to reduce feature dimensions using distance measurement. The experimental results on representative databases show that the proposed LBPV operator and global matching scheme can achieve significant improvement, sometimes more than 10 in terms of classification accuracy, over traditional locally rotation invariant LBP method. The histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) is widely used for image description and proves to be very effective. In many vision problems, rotation-invariant analysis is necessary or preferred. Popular solutions are mainly based on pose normalization or learning, neglecting some intrinsic properties of rotations. This paper presents a method to build rotation-invariant HOG descriptors using Fourier analysis in polar spherical coordinates, which are closely related to the irreducible representation of the 2D 3D rotation groups. This is achieved by considering a gradient histogram as a continuous angular signal which can be well represented by the Fourier basis (2D) or spherical harmonics (3D). As rotation-invariance is established in an analytical way, we can avoid discretization artifacts and create a continuous mapping from the image to the feature space. In the experiments, we first show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art in a public dataset for a car detection task in aerial images. We further use the Princeton Shape Benchmark and the SHREC 2009 Generic Shape Benchmark to demonstrate the high performance of our method for similarity measures of 3D shapes. Finally, we show an application on microscopic volumetric data.