Recurrent Multiresolution Convolutional Networks for VHR Image Classification

Classification of very high-resolution (VHR) satellite images has three major challenges: 1) inherent low intraclass and high interclass spectral similarities; 2) mismatching resolution of available bands; and 3) the need to regularize noisy classification maps. Conventional methods have addressed these challenges by adopting separate stages of image fusion, feature extraction, and postclassification map regularization. These processing stages, however, are not jointly optimizing the classification task at hand. In this paper, we propose a single-stage framework embedding the processing stages in a recurrent multiresolution convolutional network trained in an end-to-end manner. The feedforward version of the network, called FuseNet, aims to match the resolution of the panchromatic and multispectral bands in a VHR image using convolutional layers with corresponding downsampling and upsampling operations. Contextual label information is incorporated into FuseNet by means of a recurrent version called ReuseNet. We compared FuseNet and ReuseNet against the use of separate processing steps for both image fusions, e.g., pansharpening and resampling through interpolation and map regularization such as conditional random fields. We carried out our experiments on a land-cover classification task using a Worldview-03 image of Quezon City, Philippines, and the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing 2-D semantic labeling benchmark data set of Vaihingen, Germany. FuseNet and ReuseNet surpass the baseline approaches in both the quantitative and qualitative results.