P2FEViT: Plug-and-Play CNN Feature Embedded Hybrid Vision Transformer for Remote Sensing Image Classification

Remote sensing image classification (RSIC) is a classical and fundamental task in the intelligent interpretation of remote sensing imagery, which can provide unique labeling information for each acquired remote sensing image. Thanks to the potent global context information extraction ability of the multi-head self-attention (MSA) mechanism, visual transformer (ViT)-based architectures have shown excellent capability in natural scene image classification. However, in order to achieve powerful RSIC performance, it is insufficient to capture global spatial information alone. Specifically, for fine-grained target recognition tasks with high inter-class similarity, discriminative and effective local feature representations are key to correct classification. In addition, due to the lack of inductive biases, the powerful global spatial context representation capability of ViT requires lengthy training procedures and large-scale pre-training data volume. To solve the above problems, a hybrid architecture of convolution neural network (CNN) and ViT is proposed to improve the RSIC ability, called P2FEViT, which integrates plug-and-play CNN features with ViT. In this paper, the feature representation capabilities of CNN and ViT applying for RSIC are first analyzed. Second, aiming to integrate the advantages of CNN and ViT, a novel approach embedding CNN features into the ViT architecture is proposed, which can make the model synchronously capture and fuse global context and local multimodal information to further improve the classification capability of ViT. Third, based on the hybrid structure, only a simple cross-entropy loss is employed for model training. The model can also have rapid and comfortable convergence with relatively less training data than the original ViT. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted on the public and challenging remote sensing scene classification dataset of NWPU-RESISC45 (NWPU-R45) and the self-built fine-grained target classification dataset called BIT-AFGR50. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed P2FEViT can effectively improve the feature description capability and obtain outstanding image classification performance, while significantly reducing the high dependence of ViT on large-scale pre-training data volume and accelerating the convergence speed. The code and self-built dataset will be released at our webpages.