A Novel Framework to Jointly Compress and Index Remote Sensing Images for Efficient Content-Based Retrieval

Remote sensing (RS) images are usually stored in compressed format to reduce the storage size of the archives. Thus, existing content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems in RS require decoding images before applying CBIR (which is computationally demanding in the case of large-scale CBIR problems). To address this problem, in this paper, we present a joint framework that simultaneously learns RS image compression and indexing, eliminating the need for decoding RS images before applying CBIR. The proposed framework is made up of two modules. The first module aims at effectively compressing RS images. It is achieved based on an auto-encoder architecture. The second module aims at producing hash codes with a high discrimination capability. It is achieved based on a deep hashing method that exploits soft pairwise, bit-balancing and classification loss functions. We also propose a two stage learning strategy with gradient manipulation techniques to obtain image representations that are compatible with both RS image indexing and compression. Experimental results show the compression and CBIR efficacy of the proposed framework when compared to widely used approaches in RS. The code of the proposed framework is available at https://git.tu-berlin.de/rsim/RS-JCIF.