Relation Network for Multi-label Aerial Image Classification

Multi-label classification plays a momentous role in perceiving intricate contents of an aerial image and triggers several related studies over the last years. However, most of them deploy few efforts in exploiting label relations, while such dependencies are crucial for making accurate predictions. Although an LSTM layer can be introduced to modeling such label dependencies in a chain propagation manner, the efficiency might be questioned when certain labels are improperly inferred. To address this, we propose a novel aerial image multi-label classification network, attention-aware label relational reasoning network. Particularly, our network consists of three elemental modules: 1) a label-wise feature parcel learning module, 2) an attentional region extraction module, and 3) a label relational inference module. To be more specific, the label-wise feature parcel learning module is designed for extracting high-level label-specific features. The attentional region extraction module aims at localizing discriminative regions in these features and yielding attentional label-specific features. The label relational inference module finally predicts label existences using label relations reasoned from outputs of the previous module. The proposed network is characterized by its capacities of extracting discriminative label-wise features in a proposal-free way and reasoning about label relations naturally and interpretably. In our experiments, we evaluate the proposed model on the UCM multi-label dataset and a newly produced dataset, AID multi-label dataset. Quantitative and qualitative results on these two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model. To facilitate progress in the multi-label aerial image classification, the AID multi-label dataset will be made publicly available

Local Feature-Based Attribute Profiles for Optical Remote Sensing Image Classification

International audienceThis article introduces an extension of morphological attribute profiles (APs) by extracting their local features. The so-called local feature-based attribute profiles (LFAPs) are expected to provide a better characterization of each APs' filtered pixel (i.e. APs' sample) within its neighborhood, hence better deal with local texture information from the image content. In this work, LFAPs are constructed by extracting some simple first-order statistical features of the local patch around each APs' sample such as mean, standard deviation, range, etc. Then, the final feature vector characterizing each image pixel is formed by combining all local features extracted from APs of that pixel. In addition, since the self-dual attribute profiles (SDAPs) has been proved to outperform the APs in recent years, a similar process will be applied to form the local feature-based SDAPs (LFSDAPs). In order to evaluate the effectiveness of LFAPs and LFSDAPs, supervised classification using both the Random Forest and the Support Vector Machine classifiers is performed on the very high resolution Reykjavik image as well as the hyperspectral Pavia University data. Experimental results show that LFAPs (resp. LFSDAPs) can considerably improve the classification accuracy of the standard APs (resp. SDAPs) and the recently proposed histogram-based APs (HAPs)