GCSANet: A Global Context Spatial Attention Deep Learning Network for Remote Sensing Scene Classification

• Published in: IEEE journal of selected topics in applied earth observations and remote sensing Vol. 15; pp. 1150 - 1162
• Main Authors: Chen, Weitao, Ouyang, Shubing, Tong, Wei, Li, Xianju, Zheng, Xiongwei, Wang, Lizhe
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Artificial neural networks; Attention mechanism; Classification; Computer networks; Context; Convolutional neural networks; Data mining; Datasets; Deep learning; feature channel; Feature extraction; global context information; Image analysis; Image classification; Image enhancement; Machine learning; Mountains; Neural networks; Object recognition; Performance evaluation; Remote sensing; Scene classification; Smoothness; Spatial data; Spatial discrimination learning
• DOI: 10.1109/JSTARS.2022.3141826
• ISSN: 1939-1404

Deep convolutional neural networks have become an indispensable method in remote sensing image scene classification because of their powerful feature extraction capabilities. However, the ability of the models to extract multiscale features and global features on surface objects of complex scenes is currently insufficient. We propose a framework based on global context spatial attention (GCSA) and densely connected convolutional networks to extract multiscale global scene features, called GCSANet. The mixup operation is used to enhance the spatial mixed data of remote sensing images, and the discrete sample space is rendered continuous to improve the smoothness in the neighborhood of the data space. The characteristics of multiscale surface objects are extracted, and their internal dense connection is strengthened by the densely connected backbone network. GCSA is introduced into the densely connected backbone network to encode the context information of the remote sensing scene image into the local features. Experiments were performed on four remote sensing scene datasets to evaluate the performance of GCSANet. The GCSANet achieved the highest classification precision on AID and NWPU datasets and the second-best performance on the UC Merced dataset, indicating the GCSANet can effectively extract the global features of remote sensing images. In addition, the GCSANet presents the highest classification accuracy on the constructed mountain image scene dataset. These results reveal that the GCSANet can effectively extract multiscale global scene features on complex remote sensing scenes. The source codes of this method can be foundin https://github.com/ShubingOuyangcug/GCSANet .