A Multi-Scale Progressive Collaborative Attention Network for Remote Sensing Fusion Classification

With the development of remote sensing technology, panchromatic images (PANs) and multispectral images (MSs) can be easily obtained. PAN has higher spatial resolution, while MS has more spectral information. So how to use the two kinds of images’ characteristics to design a network has become a hot research field. In this article, a multi-scale progressive collaborative attention network (MPCA-Net) is proposed for PAN and MS’s fusion classification. Compared to the traditional multi-scale convolution operations, we adopt an adaptive dilation rate selection strategy (ADR-SS) to adaptively select the dilation rate to deal with the problem of category area’s excessive scale differences. For the traditional pixel-by-pixel sliding window sampling strategy, the patches which are generated by adjacent pixels but belonging to different categories contain a considerable overlap of information. So we change original sampling strategy and propose a center pixel migration (CPM) strategy. It migrates the center pixel to the most similar position of the neighborhood information for classification, which reduces network confusion and increases its stability. Moreover, due to the different spatial and spectral characteristics of PAN and MS, the same network structure for the two branches ignores their respective advantages. For a certain branch, as the network deepens, characteristic has different representations in different stages, so using the same module in multiple feature extraction stages is inappropriate. Thus we carefully design different modules for each feature extraction stage of the two branches. Between the two branches, because the strong mapping methods of directly cascading their features are too rough, we design collaborative progressive fusion modules to eliminate the differences. The experimental results verify that our proposed method can achieve competitive performance.