Scene Classfication Based on the Semantic-feature Fusion Fully Sparse Topic Model for High Spatial Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery

Topic modeling has been an increasingly mature method to bridge the semantic gap between the low-level features and high-level semantic information. However, with more and more high spatial resolution (HSR) images to deal with, conventional probabilistic topic model (PTM) usually presents the images with a dense semantic representation. This consumes more time and requires more storage space. In addition, due to the complex spectral and spatial information, a combination of multiple complementary features is proved to be an effective strategy to improve the performance for HSR image scene classification. But it should be noticed that how the distinct features are fused to fully describe the challenging HSR images, which is a critical factor for scene classification. In this paper, a semantic-feature fusion fully sparse topic model (SFF-FSTM) is proposed for HSR imagery scene classification. In SFFFSTM, three heterogeneous features—the mean and standard deviation based spectral feature, wavelet based texture feature, and dense scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) based structural feature are effectively fused at the latent semantic level. The combination of multiple semantic-feature fusion strategy and sparse based FSTM is able to provide adequate feature representations, and can achieve comparable performance with limited training samples. Experimental results on the UC Merced dataset and Google dataset of SIRI-WHU demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the performance of scene classification compared with other scene classification methods for HSR imagery. * Corresponding author