We address the problem of scene classification from optical remote sensing
(RS) images based on the paradigm of hierarchical metric learning. Ideally,
supervised metric learning strategies learn a projection from a set of training
data points so as to minimize intra-class variance while maximizing inter-class
separability to the class label space. However, standard metric learning
techniques do not incorporate the class interaction information in learning the
transformation matrix, which is often considered to be a bottleneck while
dealing with fine-grained visual categories. As a remedy, we propose to
organize the classes in a hierarchical fashion by exploring their visual
similarities and subsequently learn separate distance metric transformations
for the classes present at the non-leaf nodes of the tree. We employ an
iterative max-margin clustering strategy to obtain the hierarchical
organization of the classes. Experiment results obtained on the large-scale
NWPU-RESISC45 and the popular UC-Merced datasets demonstrate the efficacy of
the proposed hierarchical metric learning based RS scene recognition strategy
in comparison to the standard approaches.Comment: Undergoing revision in GRS