Differential Convolution Feature Guided Deep Multi-Scale Multiple Instance Learning for Aerial Scene Classification

Aerial image classification is challenging for current deep learning models due to the varied geo-spatial object scales and the complicated scene spatial arrangement. Thus, it is necessary to stress the key local feature response from a variety of scales so as to represent discriminative convolutional features. In this paper, we propose a deep multi-scale multiple instance learning (DMSMIL) framework to tackle the above challenges. Firstly, we develop a differential multi-scale dilated convolution feature extractor to exploit the different patterns from different scales. Then, the deep features of each scale are fed into a multiple instance learning module to generate a bag-level probability prediction. Lastly, probability predictions from all the MIL branches are fused to generate the final semantic prediction. Extensive experiments on three widely-utilized aerial scene classification benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed DMSMIL outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin.