Toward Federated Customized Neural Architecture Search for Remote Sensing Scene Classification

Abstract

Remote sensing (RS) scenarios usually involve sensitive geographic information on national security and regional development. In the commonly used centralized machine-learning paradigm, data dispersed in various locations are concentrated and processed on a single server, which is prone to privacy leakage and data security concerns. Besides, it is difficult to solve the high heterogeneity of RS images by simply applying federated learning (FL) algorithms to scene classification. In this article, we formulate a federated remote sensing scene classification (FedSC) framework, and design a customized neural architecture search (CNAS) to achieve both global generality for multiparty collaborative distributed training and local specificity for personalized RS scene customization. The proposed FedSC is generalizable to be implemented in any manually designed networks, network pruning strategies, or NAS methods related to remote sensing scene classification (RSSC). While the designed CNAS not only achieves collaborative distributed training in protecting participant data privacy to obtain a generalized global model, but also provides a customized local model for each participant that is more in line with the characteristics of private RS scenarios. Overall, the proposed FedSC $_{\textrm {CNAS}}$ provides a novel federated collaborative training paradigm for RSSC in terms of data privacy, data heterogeneity, and personalized customization. Extensive analytical and comparative experiments on three benchmark RSSC datasets validate the versatility and effectiveness of our methods, and the proposed FedSC $_{\textrm {CNAS}}$ exhibits superior competitiveness compared to state-of-the-art methods.