Attention based network for remote sensing scene classification

Scene classification of very high resolution remote sensing images is becoming more and more important because of its wide range of applications. However, previous works are mainly based on handcrafted features which do not have enough adaptability and expression ability. In this paper, inspired by the attention mechanism of human visual system, we propose a novel attention based network (AttNet) for scene classification. It can focus selectively on some key areas of images so that it can abandon redundant information. Essentially, AttNet gives a way to readjust the signal of supervision, and it is one of the first successful attempts on visual attention for remote sensing scene classification. Our method is evaluated on the UC Merced Land-Use Dataset, in comparison with some state-of-the-art methods. The experimental result shows that the proposed method makes a great improvement on both convergence speed and classification accuracy, and it also shows the effectiveness of visual attention for this task. © 2018 IEEE.