Large-Scale Aerial Image Categorization Using a Multitask Topological Codebook

Fast and accurately categorizing the millions of aerial images on Google Maps is a useful technique in pattern recognition. Existing methods cannot handle this task successfully due to two reasons: 1) the aerial images' topologies are the key feature to distinguish their categories, but they cannot be effectively encoded by a conventional visual codebook and 2) it is challenging to build a realtime image categorization system, as some geo-aware Apps update over 20 aerial images per second. To solve these problems, we propose an efficient aerial image categorization algorithm. It focuses on learning a discriminative topological codebook of aerial images under a multitask learning framework. The pipeline can be summarized as follows. We first construct a region adjacency graph (RAG) that describes the topology of each aerial image. Naturally, aerial image categorization can be formulated as RAG-to-RAG matching. According to graph theory, RAG-to-RAG matching is conducted by enumeratively comparing all their respective graphlets (i.e., small subgraphs). To alleviate the high time consumption, we propose to learn a codebook containing topologies jointly discriminative to multiple categories. The learned topological codebook guides the extraction of the discriminative graphlets. Finally, these graphlets are integrated into an AdaBoost model for predicting aerial image categories. Experimental results show that our approach is competitive to several existing recognition models. Furthermore, over 24 aerial images are processed per second, demonstrating that our approach is ready for real-world applications.