Robust Normalized Softmax Loss for Deep Metric Learning-Based Characterization of Remote Sensing Images With Label Noise

Most deep metric learning-based image characterization methods exploit supervised information to model the semantic relations among the remote sensing (RS) scenes. Nonetheless, the unprecedented availability of large-scale RS data makes the annotation of such images very challenging, requiring automated supportive processes. Whether the annotation is assisted by aggregation or crowd-sourcing, the RS large-variance problem, together with other important factors [e.g., geo-location/registration errors, land-cover changes, even low-quality Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), etc.] often introduce the so-called label noise, i.e., semantic annotation errors. In this article, we first investigate the deep metric learning-based characterization of RS images with label noise and propose a novel loss formulation, named robust normalized softmax loss (RNSL), for robustly learning the metrics among RS scenes. Specifically, our RNSL improves the robustness of the normalized softmax loss (NSL), commonly utilized for deep metric learning, by replacing its logarithmic function with the negative Box–Cox transformation in order to down-weight the contributions from noisy images on the learning of the corresponding class prototypes. Moreover, by truncating the loss with a certain threshold, we also propose a truncated robust normalized softmax loss (t-RNSL) which can further enforce the learning of class prototypes based on the image features with high similarities between them, so that the intraclass features can be well grouped and interclass features can be well separated. Our experiments, conducted on two benchmark RS data sets, validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach with respect to different state-of-the-art methods in three different downstream applications (classification, clustering, and retrieval). The codes of this article will be publicly available from
https://github.com/jiankang1991
.