Remote Sensing, Vol. 11, Pages 1996: AttentionBased Deep Feature Fusion for the Scene Classification of HighResolution Remote Sensing Images (Remote Sensing)

Scene classification of highresolution remote sensing images (HRRSI) is one of the most important means of landcover classification. Deep learning techniques, especially the convolutional neural network (CNN) have been widely applied to the scene classification of HRRSI due to the advancement of graphic processing units (GPU). However, they tend to extract features from the whole images rather than discriminative regions. The visual attention mechanism can force the CNN to focus on discriminative regions, but it may suffer from the influence of intraclass diversity and repeated texture. Motivated by these problems, we propose an attention-based deep feature fusion (ADFF) framework that constitutes three parts, namely attention maps generated by Gradientweighted Class Activation Mapping (GradCAM), a multiplicative fusion of deep features and the centerbased cross-entropy loss function. First of all, we propose to make attention maps generated by GradCAM as an explicit input in order to force the network to concentrate on discriminative regions. Then, deep features derived from original images and attention maps are proposed to be fused by multiplicative fusion in order to consider both improved abilities to distinguish scenes of repeated texture and the salient regions. Finally, the centerbased cross-entropy loss function that utilizes both the cross-entropy loss and center loss function is proposed to backpropagate fused features so as to reduce the effect of intraclass diversity on feature representations. The proposed ADFF architecture is tested on three benchmark datasets to show its performance in scene classification. The experiments confirm that the proposed method outperforms most competitive scene classification methods with an average overall accuracy of 94% under different training ratios.