Dirichlet-Derived Multiple Topic Scene Classification Model for High Spatial Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery

Due to the complex arrangements of the ground objects in high spatial resolution (HSR) imagery scenes, HSR imagery scene classification is a challenging task, which is aimed at bridging the semantic gap between the low-level features and the high-level semantic concepts. A combination of multiple complementary features for HSR imagery scene classification is considered a potential way to improve the performance. However, the different types of features have different characteristics, and how to fuse the different types of features is a classic problem. In this paper, a Dirichlet-derived multiple topic model (DMTM) is proposed to fuse heterogeneous features at a topic level for HSR imagery scene classification. An efficient algorithm based on a variational expectation maximization framework is developed to infer the DMTM and estimate the parameters of the DMTM. The proposed DMTM scene classification method is able to incorporate different types of features with different characteristics, no matter whether these features are local or global, discrete or continuous. Meanwhile, the proposed DMTM can also reduce the dimension of the features representing the HSR images. In our experiments, three types of heterogeneous features, i.e., the local spectral feature, the local structural feature, and the global textural feature, were employed. The experimental results with three different HSR imagery data sets show that the three types of features are complementary. In addition, the proposed DMTM is able to reduce the dimension of the features representing the HSR images, to fuse the different types of features efficiently, and to improve the performance of the scene classification over that of other scene classification algorithms based on spatial pyramid matching, probabilistic latent semantic analysis, and latent Dirichlet allocation.