Content-Based High-Resolution Remote Sensing Image Retrieval via Unsupervised Feature Learning and Collaborative Affinity Metric Fusion

With the urgent demand for automatic management of large numbers of high-resolution remote sensing images, content-based high-resolution remote sensing image retrieval (CB-HRRS-IR) has attracted much research interest. Accordingly, this paper proposes a novel high-resolution remote sensing image retrieval approach via multiple feature representation and collaborative affinity metric fusion (IRMFRCAMF). In IRMFRCAMF, we design four unsupervised convolutional neural networks with different layers to generate four types of unsupervised features from the fine level to the coarse level. In addition to these four types of unsupervised features, we also implement four traditional feature descriptors, including local binary pattern (LBP), gray level co-occurrence (GLCM), maximal response 8 (MR8), and scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT). In order to fully incorporate the complementary information among multiple features of one image and the mutual information across auxiliary images in the image dataset, this paper advocates collaborative affinity metric fusion to measure the similarity between images. The performance evaluation of high-resolution remote sensing image retrieval is implemented on two public datasets, the UC Merced (UCM) dataset and the Wuhan University (WH) dataset. Large numbers of experiments show that our proposed IRMFRCAMF can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art approaches.