Abstract: This paper introduces the use of single-layer and deep convolutional networks for remote sensing data analysis. Direct application to multi- and hyperspectral imagery of supervised (shallow or deep) convolutional networks is very challenging given the high input data dimensionality and the relatively small amount of available labeled data. Therefore, we propose the use of greedy layerwise unsupervised pretraining coupled with a highly efficient algorithm for unsupervised learning of sparse features. The algorithm is rooted on sparse representations and enforces both population and lifetime sparsity of the extracted features, simultaneously. We successfully illustrate the expressive power of the extracted representations in several scenarios: classification of aerial scenes, as well as land-use classification in very high resolution or land-cover classification from multi- and hyperspectral images. The proposed algorithm clearly outperforms standard principal component analysis (PCA) and its kernel counterpart (kPCA), as well as current state-of-the-art algorithms of aerial classification, while being extremely computationally efficient at learning representations of data. Results show that single-layer convolutional networks can extract powerful discriminative features only when the receptive field accounts for neighboring pixels and are preferred when the classification requires high resolution and detailed results. However, deep architectures significantly outperform single-layer variants, capturing increasing levels of abstraction and complexity throughout the feature hierarchy.

Abstract: Designing discriminative powerful texture features robust to realistic imaging conditions is a challenging computer vision problem with many applications, including material recognition and analysis of satellite or aerial imagery. In the past, most texture description approaches were based on dense orderless statistical distribution of local features. However, most recent approaches to texture recognition and remote sensing scene classification are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The de facto practice when learning these CNN models is to use RGB patches as input with training performed on large amounts of labeled data (ImageNet). In this paper, we show that Local Binary Patterns (LBP) encoded CNN models, codenamed TEX-Nets, trained using mapped coded images with explicit LBP based texture information provide complementary information to the standard RGB deep models. Additionally, two deep architectures, namely early and late fusion, are investigated to combine the texture and color information. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate Binary Patterns encoded CNNs and different deep network fusion architectures for texture recognition and remote sensing scene classification. We perform comprehensive experiments on four texture recognition datasets and four remote sensing scene classification benchmarks: UC-Merced with 21 scene categories, WHU-RS19 with 19 scene classes, RSSCN7 with 7 categories and the recently introduced large scale aerial image dataset (AID) with 30 aerial scene types. We demonstrate that TEX-Nets provide complementary information to standard RGB deep model of the same network architecture. Our late fusion TEX-Net architecture always improves the overall performance compared to the standard RGB network on both recognition problems. Furthermore, our final combination leads to consistent improvement over the state-of-the-art for remote sensing scene

Abstract: Before the big data era, scene recognition was often approached with two-step inference using localized intermediate representations (objects, topics, and so on). One of such approaches is the semantic manifold (SM), in which patches and images are modeled as points in a semantic probability simplex. Patch models are learned resorting to weak supervision via image labels, which leads to the problem of scene categories co-occurring in this semantic space. Fortunately, each category has its own co-occurrence patterns that are consistent across the images in that category. Thus, discovering and modeling these patterns are critical to improve the recognition performance in this representation. Since the emergence of large data sets, such as ImageNet and Places, these approaches have been relegated in favor of the much more powerful convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which can automatically learn multi-layered representations from the data. In this paper, we address many limitations of the original SM approach and related works. We propose discriminative patch representations using neural networks and further propose a hybrid architecture in which the semantic manifold is built on top of multiscale CNNs. Both representations can be computed significantly faster than the Gaussian mixture models of the original SM. To combine multiple scales, spatial relations, and multiple features, we formulate rich context models using Markov random fields. To solve the optimization problem, we analyze global and local approaches, where a top-down hierarchical algorithm has the best performance. Experimental results show that exploiting different types of contextual relations jointly consistently improves the recognition accuracy.