A CNN-RNN Framework with a Novel Patch-Based Multi-Attention Mechanism for Multi-Label Image Classification in Remote Sensing

This paper presents a novel framework that jointly exploits Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) in the context of multi-label remote sensing (RS) image classification. The proposed framework consists of four main modules. The first module aims to extract preliminary local descriptors by considering that RS image bands can be associated with different spatial resolutions. To this end, we introduce a K-Branch CNN in which each branch aims at extracting descriptors of image bands that have the same spatial resolution. The second module aims to model spatial relationship among local descriptors. To this end, we propose a Bidirectional RNN architecture in which Long Short-Term Memory nodes enrich local descriptors by considering spatial relationships of local areas (image patches). The third module aims to define multiple attention scores for local descriptors. To this end, we introduce a novel patch-based multi-attention mechanism that takes into account the joint occurrence of multiple land-cover classes and provides the attention-based local descriptors. The last module aims to employ these descriptors for multi-label RS image classification. Experimental results obtained on our large-scale Sentinel-2 benchmark archive (called as BigEarthNet) show the effectiveness of the proposed framework compared to a state of the art method.