Exploiting Deep Features for Remote Sensing Image Retrieval: A Systematic Investigation

Remote sensing (RS) image retrieval is of great significant for geological information mining. Over the past two decades, a large amount of research on this task has been carried out, which mainly focuses on the following three core issues: feature extraction, similarity metric and relevance feedback. Due to the complexity and multiformity of ground objects in high-resolution remote sensing (HRRS) images, there is still room for improvement in the current retrieval approaches. In this paper, we analyze the three core issues of RS image retrieval and provide a comprehensive review on existing methods. Furthermore, for the goal to advance the state-of-the-art in HRRS image retrieval, we focus on the feature extraction issue and delve how to use powerful deep representations to address this task. We conduct systematic investigation on evaluating correlative factors that may affect the performance of deep features. By optimizing each factor, we acquire remarkable retrieval results on publicly available HRRS datasets. Finally, we explain the experimental phenomenon in detail and draw conclusions according to our analysis. Our work can serve as a guiding role for the research of content-based RS image retrieval

Class-Weighted Convolutional Features for Visual Instance Search

Image retrieval in realistic scenarios targets large dynamic datasets of unlabeled images. In these cases, training or fine-tuning a model every time new images are added to the database is neither efficient nor scalable. Convolutional neural networks trained for image classification over large datasets have been proven effective feature extractors for image retrieval. The most successful approaches are based on encoding the activations of convolutional layers, as they convey the image spatial information. In this paper, we go beyond this spatial information and propose a local-aware encoding of convolutional features based on semantic information predicted in the target image. To this end, we obtain the most discriminative regions of an image using Class Activation Maps (CAMs). CAMs are based on the knowledge contained in the network and therefore, our approach, has the additional advantage of not requiring external information. In addition, we use CAMs to generate object proposals during an unsupervised re-ranking stage after a first fast search. Our experiments on two public available datasets for instance retrieval, Oxford5k and Paris6k, demonstrate the competitiveness of our approach outperforming the current state-of-the-art when using off-the-shelf models trained on ImageNet. The source code and model used in this paper are publicly available at http://imatge-upc.github.io/retrieval-2017-cam/.Comment: To appear in the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), September 201

Impact of Feature Representation on Remote Sensing Image Retrieval

Remote sensing images are acquired using special platforms, sensors and are classified as aerial, multispectral and hyperspectral images. Multispectral and hyperspectral images are represented using large spectral vectors as compared to normal Red, Green, Blue (RGB) images. Hence, remote sensing image retrieval process from large archives is a challenging task.  Remote sensing image retrieval mainly consist of feature representation as first step and finding out similar images to a query image as second step. Feature representation plays important part in the performance of remote sensing image retrieval process. Research work focuses on impact of feature representation of remote sensing images on the performance of remote sensing image retrieval. This study shows that more discriminative features of remote sensing images are needed to improve performance of remote sensing image retrieval process

Perceptual-based textures for scene labeling: a bottom-up and a top-down approach

Due to the semantic gap, the automatic interpretation of digital images is a very challenging task. Both the segmentation and classification are intricate because of the high variation of the data. Therefore, the application of appropriate features is of utter importance. This paper presents biologically inspired texture features for material classification and interpreting outdoor scenery images. Experiments show that the presented texture features obtain the best classification results for material recognition compared to other well-known texture features, with an average classification rate of 93.0%. For scene analysis, both a bottom-up and top-down strategy are employed to bridge the semantic gap. At first, images are segmented into regions based on the perceptual texture and next, a semantic label is calculated for these regions. Since this emerging interpretation is still error prone, domain knowledge is ingested to achieve a more accurate description of the depicted scene. By applying both strategies, 91.9% of the pixels from outdoor scenery images obtained a correct label

Data-Driven Shape Analysis and Processing

Data-driven methods play an increasingly important role in discovering geometric, structural, and semantic relationships between 3D shapes in collections, and applying this analysis to support intelligent modeling, editing, and visualization of geometric data. In contrast to traditional approaches, a key feature of data-driven approaches is that they aggregate information from a collection of shapes to improve the analysis and processing of individual shapes. In addition, they are able to learn models that reason about properties and relationships of shapes without relying on hard-coded rules or explicitly programmed instructions. We provide an overview of the main concepts and components of these techniques, and discuss their application to shape classification, segmentation, matching, reconstruction, modeling and exploration, as well as scene analysis and synthesis, through reviewing the literature and relating the existing works with both qualitative and numerical comparisons. We conclude our report with ideas that can inspire future research in data-driven shape analysis and processing.Comment: 10 pages, 19 figure