Local feature representation based on linear filtering with feature pooling and divisive normalization for remote sensing image classification

Abstract. We propose a local feature representation based on two types of linear filtering, feature pooling, and nonlinear divisive normalization for remote sensing image classification. First, images are decomposed using a bank of log-Gabor and Gaussian derivative filters to obtain filtering responses that are robust to changes in various lighting conditions. Second, the filtering responses computed using the same filter at nearby locations are pooled together to enhance position invariance and compact representation. Third, divisive normalization with channel-wise strategy, in which each pooled feature is divided by a common factor plus the sum of the neighboring features to reduce dependencies among nearby locations, is introduced to extract divisive normalization features (DNFs). Power-law transformation and principal component analysis are applied to make DNF significantly distinguishable, followed by feature fusion to enhance local description. Finally, feature encoding is used to aggregate DNFs into a global representation. Experiments on 21-class land use and 19-class satellite scene datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the channel-wise divisive normalization compared with standard normalization across channels and the fusion of the two types of linear filtering in improving classification accuracy. The experiments also illustrate that the proposed method is competitive with state-of-the-art approaches.