Multi-View Urban Scene Classification with a Complementary-Information Learning Model

Traditional urban scene-classification approaches focus on images taken either by satellite or in aerial view. Although single-view images are able to achieve satisfactory results for scene classification in most situations, the complementary information provided by other image views is needed to further improve performance. Therefore, we present a complementary information-learning model (CILM) to perform multi-view scene classification of aerial and ground-level images. Specifically, the proposed CILM takes aerial and ground-level image pairs as input to learn view-specific features for later fusion to integrate the complementary information. To train CILM, a unified loss consisting of cross entropy and contrastive losses is exploited to force the network to be more robust. Once CILM is trained, the features of each view are extracted via the two proposed feature-extraction scenarios and then fused to train the support vector machine classifier for classification. The experimental results on two publicly available benchmark data sets demonstrate that CILM achieves remarkable performance, indicating that it is an effective model for learning complementary information and thus improving urban scene classification.