High‐resolution SAR image classification using multi‐scale deep feature fusion and covariance pooling manifold network

Abstract

The classification of high‐resolution (HR) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is of great importance for SAR scene interpretation and application. However, the presence of intricate spatial structural patterns and complex statistical nature makes SAR image classification a challenging task, especially in the case of limited labeled SAR data. This paper proposes a novel HR SAR image classification method, using a multi‐scale deep feature fusion network and covariance pooling manifold network (MFFN‐CPMN). MFFN‐CPMN combines the advantages of local spatial features and global statistical properties and considers the multi‐feature information fusion of SAR images in representation learning. First, we propose a Gabor‐filtering‐based multi‐scale feature fusion network (MFFN) to capture the spatial pattern and get the discriminative features of SAR images. The MFFN belongs to a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). To make full use of a large amount of unlabeled data, the weights of each layer of MFFN are optimized by unsupervised denoising dual‐sparse encoder. Moreover, the feature fusion strategy in MFFN can effectively exploit the com-plementary information between different levels and different scales. Second, we utilize a covari-ance pooling manifold network to extract further the global second‐order statistics of SAR images over the fusional feature maps. Finally, the obtained covariance descriptor is more distinct for various land covers. Experimental results on four HR SAR images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and achieve promising results over other related algorithms.