Preliminary exploration of SAR image land cover classification with noisy labels

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image land cover classification is an important task in SAR image interpretation. Supervised learning, such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), demands instances which are accurately labeled. However, a large amount of accurately labeled SAR images are difficult to produce. In this paper, a Probability Transition CNN (PTCNN) is proposed for patch-level SAR image land cover classification with noisy labels. Firstly, deep features are extracted by a CNN model, followed by a probabilistic transition model, where true labels are treated as hidden variables and the posterior probabilities of true labels are transferred into their noisy versions. The whole network is trained with Caffe in a uniform fashion and a land cover database is used to produce noisy labels, which are randomly chosen with various proportions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed PTCNN model is robust to noise and gives a promising classification performance. Therefore, the PTCNN model may lower the standards for the quality of image labels, and shows its availability in practical applications.