BayesNet: Enhancing UAV-Based Remote Sensing Scene Understanding with Quantifiable Uncertainties

Remote sensing stands as a fundamental technique in contemporary environmental monitoring, facilitating extensive data collection and offering invaluable insights into the dynamic nature of the Earth’s surface. The advent of deep learning, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs), has furth...

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Published inRemote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 16; no. 5; p. 925
Main Authors Sagar, A. S. M. Sharifuzzaman, Tanveer, Jawad, Chen, Yu, Dang, L. Minh, Haider, Amir, Song, Hyoung-Kyu, Moon, Hyeonjoon
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.03.2024
Subjects
Accuracy
Algorithms
Artificial neural networks
attention module
Back propagation
Bayesian analysis
Bayesian CNN
Benchmarks
Classification
Data analysis
Data collection
Datasets
Deep learning
Drone aircraft
Earth surface
Environmental monitoring
Epistemology
Feature extraction
Machine learning
Mathematical models
Medical imaging equipment
Neural networks
Probability distribution
Remote sensing
Scene analysis
Uncertainty
uncertainty quantification
Unmanned aerial vehicles
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Summary:Remote sensing stands as a fundamental technique in contemporary environmental monitoring, facilitating extensive data collection and offering invaluable insights into the dynamic nature of the Earth’s surface. The advent of deep learning, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs), has further revolutionized this domain by enhancing scene understanding. However, despite the advancements, traditional CNN methodologies face challenges such as overfitting in imbalanced datasets and a lack of precise uncertainty quantification, crucial for extracting meaningful insights and enhancing the precision of remote sensing techniques. Addressing these critical issues, this study introduces BayesNet, a Bayesian neural network (BNN)-driven CNN model designed to normalize and estimate uncertainties, particularly aleatoric and epistemic, in remote sensing datasets. BayesNet integrates a novel channel–spatial attention module to refine feature extraction processes in remote sensing imagery, thereby ensuring a robust analysis of complex scenes. BayesNet was trained on four widely recognized unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based remote sensing datasets, UCM21, RSSCN7, AID, and NWPU, and demonstrated good performance, achieving accuracies of 99.99%, 97.30%, 97.57%, and 95.44%, respectively. Notably, it has showcased superior performance over existing models in the AID, NWPU, and UCM21 datasets, with enhancements of 0.03%, 0.54%, and 0.23%, respectively. This improvement is significant in the context of complex scene classification of remote sensing images, where even slight improvements mark substantial progress against complex and highly optimized benchmarks. Moreover, a self-prepared remote sensing testing dataset is also introduced to test BayesNet against unseen data, and it achieved an accuracy of 96.39%, which showcases the effectiveness of the BayesNet in scene classification tasks.
ISSN:2072-4292
2072-4292
DOI:10.3390/rs16050925