A Three-Layered Graph-Based Learning Approach for Remote Sensing Image Retrieval

摘要

With the emergence of huge volumes of high-resolution remote sensing images produced by all sorts of satellites and airborne sensors, processing and analysis of these images require effective retrieval techniques. To alleviate the dramatic variation of the retrieval accuracy among queries caused by the single image feature algorithms, we developed a novel graph-based learning method for effectively retrieving remote sensing images. The method utilizes a three-layer framework that integrates the strengths of query expansion and fusion of holistic and local features. In the first layer, two retrieval image sets are obtained by, respectively, using the retrieval methods based on holistic and local features, and the top-ranked and common images from both of the top candidate lists subsequently form graph anchors. In the second layer, the graph anchors as an expansion query retrieve six image sets from the image database using each individual feature. In the third layer, the images in the six image sets are evaluated for generating positive and negative data, and SimpleMKL is applied to learn suitable query-dependent fusion weights for achieving the final image retrieval result. Extensive experiments were performed on the UC Merced Land Use–Land Cover data set. The source code has been available at our website. Compared with other related methods, the retrieval precision is significantly enhanced without sacrificing the scalability of our approach.