Location-aware multi-code generator for remote sensing scene classification.

Many types of objects are crowdedly distributed on the surface of remote sensing scenes. Global semantics with object mixture and small training samples potentially cause difficulties in the classification of remote sensing scenes. The description of them often requires crucial parts of the scenes and corresponding discriminative features, especially as the convolutional neural network (CNN) goes deeper. In this paper, we propose a novel Location-Aware Multi-code Generator network (LAM-GAN) that incorporates multiple latent codes as the input to a generator network. This network is designed to train from scratch and recover most details of the input (real) image in a principled way. Meanwhile, multiple latent codes are reversely updated using K cluster centres located by the subsequently proposed part co-location module. By doing so, the global features of the real-fake image pair and part-level features are stacked and fed to a joint part classification network for discriminative classification. This approach makes it easier to induce the semantic concepts in a remote sensing scene. With this formulation, our approach generates an internal compact representation of the scene and enables weakly supervised part co-localization. The proposed method provides a unified framework for not only generating high-quality fake images but also facilitating the remote sensing scene classification task. We evaluated LAM-GAN on several benchmark datasets, and the experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method is more effective than previous state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]