Deep Salient Feature Based Anti-Noise Transfer Network for Scene Classification of Remote Sensing Imagery

Remote sensing (RS) scene classification is important for RS imagery semantic interpretation. Although tremendous strides have been made in RS scene classification, one of the remaining open challenges is recognizing RS scenes in low quality variance (e.g., various scales and noises). This paper proposes a deep salient feature based anti-noise transfer network (DSFATN) method that effectively enhances and explores the high-level features for RS scene classification in different scales and noise conditions. In DSFATN, a novel discriminative deep salient feature (DSF) is introduced by saliency-guided DSF extraction, which conducts a patch-based visual saliency (PBVS) algorithm using “visual attention” mechanisms to guide pre-trained CNNs for producing the discriminative high-level features. Then, an anti-noise network is proposed to learn and enhance the robust and anti-noise structure information of RS scene by directly propagating the label information to fully-connected layers. A joint loss is used to minimize the anti-noise network by integrating anti-noise constraint and a softmax classification loss. The proposed network architecture can be easily trained with a limited amount of training data. The experiments conducted on three different scale RS scene datasets show that the DSFATN method has achieved excellent performance and great robustness in different scales and noise conditions. It obtains classification accuracy of 98.25%, 98.46%, and 98.80%, respectively, on the UC Merced Land Use Dataset (UCM), the Google image dataset of SIRI-WHU, and the SAT-6 dataset, advancing the state-of-the-art substantially.