A Novel Deep Multi-Instance Convolutional Neural Network for Disaster Classification From High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

The fully supervised deep convolutional neural network (CNN) cannot detect the discriminant local information that is responsible for spatial transformations in high-resolution remote sensing images. To address the various types and missing labels of natural disasters, a new deep multi-instance convolutional neural network (DMCNN) model for disaster classification in high-resolution remote sensing image is presented in this article. Specifically, based on sample enhancement and atrous spatial pyramid pooling, we first extract and integrate the features via the CNN structure to obtain the instance feature of bags in the image. Besides, introducing a prototype learning layer with distance measure, the instance features extracted from pretrained CNN are mapped into a series of prototype instance features with bag-level. Subsequently, all instance features from prototype and bag take part in disaster detection and image classification. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on xBD dataset and discussions from qualitative and quantitative aspects. Experimental results show that the proposed DMCNN model achieves better classification accuracy of natural disaster from high-resolution remote sensing images compared to traditional CNNs, and effectively improves the disaster classification performance with weakly supervised from high-resolution remote sensing images.