Few-Shot MS and PAN Joint Classification With Improved Cross-Source Contrastive Learning

The joint classification of multispectral (MS) and panchromatic (PAN) images aims to provide a more detailed and accurate interpretation of land features. Although deep-learning-based methods have achieved remarkable success in this task, the generalization performance of networks is compromised when labeled samples are insufficient. In this study, we explore the possibility of leveraging unlabeled remote sensing images (RSIs) through contrastive learning and demonstrate the challenges associated with directly applying contrastive learning to RSIs. To end this, we propose a cross-source contrastive learning method for few-shot MS and PAN joint classification (CrossCLMP), which aims to learn sufficient transferable representations in a self-supervised contrastive manner so as to provide a robust pretrained model for fine-tuning the downstream joint classification task. Specifically, we design: 1) intersource and intrasource alignment loss (ER-Align) to achieve self-supervised feature extraction and alignment; 2) the source-unique feature adaptive separation (SUAS) strategy to model source-unique information explicitly; and 3) the auxiliary contrastive learning (ACL) strategy to mitigate the adverse impact of numerous false-negative samples in the pretraining stage. The experimental results and the theoretical analyses on multiple popular datasets comprehensively demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method under few-shot. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Xidian-AIGroup190726/CrossCLMP.