Region-Wise Deep Feature Representation for Remote Sensing Images

Effective feature representations play an important role in remote sensing image analysis tasks. With the rapid progress of deep learning techniques, deep features have been widely applied to remote sensing image understanding in recent years and shown powerful ability in image representation. The existing deep feature extraction approaches are usually carried out on the whole image directly. However, such deep feature representation strategies may not effectively capture the local geometric invariance of target regions in remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a novel region-wise deep feature extraction framework for remote sensing images. First, regions that may contain the target information are extracted from one whole image. Then, these regions are fed into a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) model to extract regional deep features. Finally, the regional deep features are encoded by an improved Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD) algorithm to generate the feature representation for the image. We conducted extensive experiments on remote sensing image classification and retrieval tasks based on the proposed region-wise deep feature extraction framework. The comparison results show that the proposed approach is superior to the existing CNN feature extraction methods.