SemiRS-COC: Semi-Supervised Classification for Complex Remote Sensing Scenes With Cross-Object Consistency

Semi-supervised learning (SSL), which aims to learn with limited labeled data and massive amounts of unlabeled data, offers a promising approach to exploit the massive amounts of satellite Earth observation images. The fundamental concept underlying most state-of-the-art SSL methods involves generating pseudo-labels for unlabeled data based on image-level predictions. However, complex remote sensing (RS) scene images frequently encounter challenges, such as interference from multiple background objects and significant intra-class differences, resulting in unreliable pseudo-labels. In this paper, we propose the SemiRS-COC, a novel semi-supervised classification method for complex RS scenes. Inspired by the idea that neighboring objects in feature space should share consistent semantic labels, SemiRS-COC utilizes the similarity between foreground objects in RS images to generate reliable object-level pseudo-labels, effectively addressing the issues of multiple background objects and significant intra-class differences in complex RS images. Specifically, we first design a Local Self-Learning Object Perception (LSLOP) mechanism, which transforms multiple background objects interference of RS images into usable annotation information, enhancing the model’s object perception capability. Furthermore, we present a Cross-Object Consistency Pseudo-Labeling (COCPL) strategy, which generates reliable object-level pseudo-labels by comparing the similarity of foreground objects across different RS images, effectively handling significant intra-class differences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves excellent performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on three widely-adopted RS datasets.