Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification: Benchmark and State of the Art

Remote sensing image scene classification plays an important role in a wide range of applications and hence has been receiving remarkable attention. During the past years, significant efforts have been made to develop various datasets or present a variety of approaches for scene classification from remote sensing images. However, a systematic review of the literature concerning datasets and methods for scene classification is still lacking. In addition, almost all existing datasets have a number of limitations, including the small scale of scene classes and the image numbers, the lack of image variations and diversity, and the saturation of accuracy. These limitations severely limit the development of new approaches especially deep learning-based methods. This paper first provides a comprehensive review of the recent progress. Then, we propose a large-scale dataset, termed "NWPU-RESISC45", which is a publicly available benchmark for REmote Sensing Image Scene Classification (RESISC), created by Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU). This dataset contains 31,500 images, covering 45 scene classes with 700 images in each class. The proposed NWPU-RESISC45 (i) is large-scale on the scene classes and the total image number, (ii) holds big variations in translation, spatial resolution, viewpoint, object pose, illumination, background, and occlusion, and (iii) has high within-class diversity and between-class similarity. The creation of this dataset will enable the community to develop and evaluate various data-driven algorithms. Finally, several representative methods are evaluated using the proposed dataset and the results are reported as a useful baseline for future research.Comment: This manuscript is the accepted version for Proceedings of the IEE

Deep learning with very few and no labels

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable performance in many computer vision applications such as image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, image retrieval, and person re-identification. However, to achieve the desired performance, deep neural networks often need a tremendously large set of labeled training samples to learn its huge network model. Labeling a large dataset is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and sometimes requiring expert knowledge. In this research, we study the following important question: how to train deep neural networks with very few or even no labeled samples? This leads to our research tasks in the following two major areas: semi-supervised and unsupervised learning. Specifically, for semi-supervised learning, we developed two major approaches. The first one is the Snowball approach which learns a deep neural network from very few samples based on iterative model evolution and confident sample discovery. The second one is the learned model composition approach which composes more efficient master networks from student models of past iterations through a network learning process. Critical sample discovery is developed to discover new critical unlabeled samples near the model decision boundary and provide the master model with lookahead access to these samples to enhance its guidance capability. For unsupervised learning, we have explored two major ideas. The first idea is transformed attention consistency where the network is learned based on selfsupervision information across images instead of within one single image. The second one is spatial assembly networks for image representation learning. We introduce a new learnable module, called spatial assembly network (SAN), which performs a learned re-organization and assembly of feature points and improves the network capabilities in handling spatial variations and structural changes of the image scene. Our experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed methods have significantly improved the state-of-the-art in semi-supervised and unsupervised learning, outperforming existing methods by large margins.Includes bibliographical references

Modeling Visual Rhetoric and Semantics in Multimedia

Recent advances in machine learning have enabled computer vision algorithms to model complicated visual phenomena with accuracies unthinkable a mere decade ago. Their high-performance on a plethora of vision-related tasks has enabled computer vision researchers to begin to move beyond traditional visual recognition problems to tasks requiring higher-level image understanding. However, most computer vision research still focuses on describing what images, text, or other media literally portrays. In contrast, in this dissertation we focus on learning how and why such content is portrayed. Rather than viewing media for its content, we recast the problem as understanding visual communication and visual rhetoric. For example, the same content may be portrayed in different ways in order to present the story the author wishes to convey. We thus seek to model not only the content of the media, but its authorial intent and latent messaging. Understanding how and why visual content is portrayed a certain way requires understanding higher level abstract semantic concepts which are themselves latent within visual media. By latent, we mean the concept is not readily visually accessible within a single image (e.g. right vs left political bias), in contrast to explicit visual semantic concepts such as objects. Specifically, we study the problems of modeling photographic style (how professional photographers portray their subjects), understanding visual persuasion in image advertisements, modeling political bias in multimedia (image and text) news articles, and learning cross-modal semantic representations. While most past research in vision and natural language processing studies the case where visual content and paired text are highly aligned (as in the case of image captions), we target the case where each modality conveys complementary information to tell a larger story. We particularly focus on the problem of learning cross-modal representations from multimedia exhibiting weak alignment between the image and text modalities. A variety of techniques are presented which improve modeling of multimedia rhetoric in real-world data and enable more robust artificially intelligent systems

Learning effective binary representation with deep hashing technique for large-scale multimedia similarity search

The explosive growth of multimedia data in modern times inspires the research of performing an efficient large-scale multimedia similarity search in the existing information retrieval systems. In the past decades, the hashing-based nearest neighbor search methods draw extensive attention in this research field. By representing the original data with compact hash code, it enables the efficient similarity retrieval by only conducting bitwise operation when computing the Hamming distance. Moreover, less memory space is required to process and store the massive amounts of features for the search engines owing to the nature of compact binary code. These advantages make hashing a competitive option in large-scale visual-related retrieval tasks. Motivated by the previous dedicated works, this thesis focuses on learning compact binary representation via hashing techniques for the large-scale multimedia similarity search tasks. Particularly, several novel frameworks are proposed for popular hashing-based applications like a local binary descriptor for patch-level matching (Chapter 3), video-to-video retrieval (Chapter 4) and cross-modality retrieval (Chapter 5). This thesis starts by addressing the problem of learning local binary descriptor for better patch/image matching performance. To this end, we propose a novel local descriptor termed Unsupervised Deep Binary Descriptor (UDBD) for the patch-level matching tasks, which learns the transformation invariant binary descriptor via embedding the original visual data and their transformed sets into a common Hamming space. By imposing a l2,1-norm regularizer on the objective function, the learned binary descriptor gains robustness against noises. Moreover, a weak bit scheme is applied to address the ambiguous matching in the local binary descriptor, where the best match is determined for each query by comparing a series of weak bits between the query instance and the candidates, thus improving the matching performance. Furthermore, Unsupervised Deep Video Hashing (UDVH) is proposed to facilitate large-scale video-to-video retrieval. To tackle the imbalanced distribution issue in the video feature, balanced rotation is developed to identify a proper projection matrix such that the information of each dimension can be balanced in the fixed-bit quantization, thus improving the retrieval performance dramatically with better code quality. To provide comprehensive insights on the proposed rotation, two different video feature learning structures: stacked LSTM units (UDVH-LSTM) and Temporal Segment Network (UDVH-TSN) are presented in Chapter 4. Lastly, we extend the research topic from single-modality to cross-modality retrieval, where Self-Supervised Deep Multimodal Hashing (SSDMH) based on matrix factorization is proposed to learn unified binary code for different modalities directly without the need for relaxation. By minimizing graph regularization loss, it is prone to produce discriminative hash code via preserving the original data structure. Moreover, Binary Gradient Descent (BGD) accelerates the discrete optimization against the bit-by-bit fashion. Besides, an unsupervised version termed Unsupervised Deep Cross-Modal Hashing (UDCMH) is proposed to tackle the large-scale cross-modality retrieval when prior knowledge is unavailable