Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification Based on an Enhanced Attention Module

Abstract

Classifying different satellite remote sensing scenes is a very important subtask in the field of remote sensing image interpretation. With the recent development of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), remote sensing scene classification methods have continued to improve. However, the use of recognition methods based on CNNs is challenging because the background of remote sensing image scenes is complex and many small objects often appear in these scenes. In this letter, to improve the feature extraction and generalization abilities of deep neural networks so that they can learn more discriminative features, an enhanced attention module (EAM) was designed. Our proposed method achieved very competitive performance—94.29% accuracy on NWPU-RESISC45 and state-of-the-art performance on different remote sensing scene recognition data sets. The experimental results show that the proposed method can learn more discriminative features than state-of-the-art methods, and it can effectively improve the accuracy of scene classification for remote sensing images. Our code is available at https://github.com/williamzhao95/Pay-More-Attention.