Object Extraction From Very High-Resolution Images Using a Convolutional Neural Network Based on a Noisy Large-Scale Dataset

In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have made great achievements in object extraction from very high-resolution (VHR) images. However, most existing approaches require large quantities of clean and accurate training data to achieve impressive classification results. The presence of inaccurate labels in training datasets is known to deteriorate the performance of CNNs. In this paper, we introduce a novel efficient method for improving the robustness when training CNN on the dataset with relatively noisy labels. First, we propose a feature and label noise model (FLNM) to model the noisy label distribution in the training dataset. Then, we use a multitask deep learning framework (MDLF) to integrate the FLNM into the training process of CNN. Finally, a novel loss function concerning the high-level features is introduced to efficiently train the MDLF. We evaluate our method on datasets from Massachusetts and compare this method with other state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in improving the classification performance of CNNs trained with noisy training dataset.