Remote sensing scene classification (RSSC) is a hotspot and play very important role in the field of remote sensing image interpretation in recent years. With the recent development of the convolutional neural networks, a significant breakthrough has been made in the classification of remote sensing scenes. Many objects form complex and diverse scenes through spatial combination and association, which makes it difficult to classify remote sensing image scenes. The problem of insufficient differentiation of feature representations extracted by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) still exists, which is mainly due to the characteristics of similarity for inter-class images and diversity for intra-class images. In this paper, we propose a remote sensing image scene classification method via Multi-Branch Local Attention Network (MBLANet), where Convolutional Local Attention Module (CLAM) is embedded into all down-sampling blocks and residual blocks of ResNet backbone. CLAM contains two submodules, Convolutional Channel Attention Module (CCAM) and Local Spatial Attention Module (LSAM). The two submodules are placed in parallel to obtain both channel and spatial attentions, which helps to emphasize the main target in the complex background and improve the ability of feature representation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our method is better than state-of-the-art methods.

Remote sensing (RS) images present unique challenges for computer vision due to lower resolution, smaller objects, and fewer features. Mainstream backbone networks show promising results for traditional visual tasks. However, they use convolution to reduce feature map dimensionality, which can result in information loss for small objects in RS images and decreased performance. To address this problem, we propose a new and universal downsampling module named Robust Feature Downsampling (RFD). RFD fuses multiple feature maps extracted by different downsampling techniques, creating a more robust feature map with a complementary set of features. Leveraging this, we overcome the limitations of conventional convolutional downsampling, resulting in more accurate and robust analysis of RS images. We develop two versions of RFD module, Shallow RFD (SRFD) and Deep RFD (DRFD), tailored to adapt to different stages of feature capture and improve feature robustness. We replace the downsampling layers of existing mainstream backbones with RFD module and conduct comparative experiments on several public RS image datasets. The results show significant improvements compared to baseline approaches in RS image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. Specifically, our RFD module achieved an average performance gain of 1.5% on NWPU-RESISC45 classification dataset without utilizing any additional pretraining data, resulting in state-of-the-art performance on this dataset. Moreover, in detection and segmentation tasks on DOTA and iSAID datasets, our RFD module outperforms the baseline approaches by 2-7% when utilizing pretraining data from NWPU-RESISC45. These results highlight the value of RFD module in enhancing the performance of RS visual tasks.

Image segmentation has made great progress in recent years, but the annotation required for image segmentation is usually expensive, especially for remote sensing images. To solve this problem, we explore semi-supervised learning methods and appropriately utilize a large amount of unlabeled data to improve the performance of remote sensing image segmentation. This paper proposes a method for remote sensing image segmentation based on semi-supervised learning. We first design a Consistency Regularization (CR) training method for semi-supervised training, then employ the new learned model for Average Update of Pseudo-label (AUP), and finally combine pseudo labels and strong labels to train semantic segmentation network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on three remote sensing datasets, achieving better performance without more labeled data. Extensive experiments show that our semi-supervised method can learn the latent information from the unlabeled data to improve the segmentation performance.

With the development of deep learning in remote sensing image change detection, the dependence of change detection models on labeled data has become an important problem. To make better use of the comparatively resource-saving unlabeled data, the change detection method based on semi-supervised learning is worth further study. This paper proposes a reliable contrastive learning method for semi-supervised remote sensing image change detection. First, according to the task characteristics of change detection, we design the contrastive loss based on the changed areas to enhance the model’s feature extraction ability for changed objects. Then, to improve the quality of pseudo labels in semi-supervised learning, we use the uncertainty of unlabeled data to select reliable pseudo labels for model training. Combining these methods, semi-supervised change detection models can make full use of unlabeled data. Extensive experiments on three widely used change detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that our semi-supervised approach has better performance than related methods. The code is available at https://github.com/VCISwang/RC-Change-Detection.

Although neural networks have achieved great success in various fields, applications on mobile devices are limited by the computational and storage costs required for large models. The model compression (neural network pruning) technology can significantly reduce network parameters and improve computational efficiency. In this article, we propose a differentiable network channel pruning (DNCP) method for model compression. Unlike existing methods that require sampling and evaluation of a large number of substructures, our method can efficiently search for optimal substructure that meets resource constraints (e.g., FLOPs) through gradient descent. Specifically, we assign a learnable probability to each possible number of channels in each layer of the network, relax the selection of a particular number of channels to a softmax over all possible numbers of channels, and optimize the learnable probability in an end-to-end manner through gradient descent. After the network parameters are optimized, we prune the network according to the learnable probability to obtain the optimal substructure. To demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of DNCP, experiments are conducted with ResNet and MobileNet V2 on CIFAR, Tiny ImageNet, and ImageNet datasets.

With the development of deep learning, remote sensing (RS) image segmentation has been applied with marked success. However, in the process of model training, the large number of labeled images required more expensive annotation. A key challenge is how to make full use of extensive unlabeled images available to improve the segmentation model. In this article, we propose a semisupervised remote sensing image semantic segmentation method defined as RanPaste, which combines labeled images with unlabeled images to improve segmentation performance. First, we obtain pseudo label by randomly pasting part of the ground truth label into the predicted segmentation map. Then, we combine the labeled and unlabeled images to generate rough predictions after strong augmentation. Finally, by using the semisupervised loss, we achieve better performance on remote sensing image segmentation. Our method combines consistency regularization and pseudo label and then utilizes thresholds to gradually improve the model performance. RanPaste enables the model to learn more underlying information in the unlabeled data. Experimental results on six datasets show that RanPaste can learn more latent information from unlabeled data to improve segmentation performance. Besides, our approach achieves better segmentation results on different network structures and datasets.