Multilabel Aerial Image Classification With a Concept Attention Graph Neural Network

Abstract

Compared with natural images, aerial images collected by satellite sensors/aerial cameras can provide a much larger field of view and often contain multiple objects of interest (multiple labels). There are certain limitations of existing multilabel aerial image classification methods. First, label correlations were often ignored in previous MAIC work, and thus, multilabel classifiers failed to be self-adapted. Second, existing multilabeled data sets for aerial images only cover limited images with fixed labels. Therefore, the underlying semantic correlations of labels cannot be fully included, while such correlation information is implicitly used as common knowledge by human beings. To tackle these concerns, we propose a novel multilabel classification method for aerial images. Our contributions are twofold. First, as the first attempt, label correlations are inferred from both the specific data set and ConceptNet (a popular knowledge graph for common sense). Second, based on graph neural network (GNN), we propose a novel end-to-end aerial image classification model, named the multiple label concept graph (ML-CG). ML-CG builds a concept graph to describe the semantic correlations from both the label set and the ConceptNet. We also incorporate both semantic attention and label attention in the GNN to better extract meaningful information of image labels. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated on both the commonly used UCM data set and a recently proposed DFC15 data set with high image resolution.