Remote Sensing Scene Classification Via Multigranularity Alternating Feature Mining

Abstract

Models based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved remarkable advances in high-resolution remote sensing (HRRS) images scene classification, but there are still challenges due to the high similarity among different categories and loss of local information. To address this issue, a multigranularity alternating feature mining (MGA-FM) framework is proposed in this article to learn and fuse both global and local information for HRRS scene classification. First, a region confusion mechanism is adopted to guide network's shallow layers to adaptively learn the salient features of distinguishing regions. Second, an alternating comprehensive training strategy is designed to capture and fuse shallow local feature information and deep semantic information to enhance feature representation capabilities. In particular, the MGA-FM framework can be flexibly embedded in various CNN backbone networks as a training mechanism. Extensive experimental results and visualization analysis on three remote sensing scene datasets indicated that the proposed method can achieve competitive classification performance.