CRABR-Net: A Contextual Relational Attention-Based Recognition Network for Remote Sensing Scene Objective

Remote sensing scene objective recognition (RSSOR) plays a serious application value in both military and civilian fields. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have greatly enhanced the improvement of intelligent objective recognition technology for remote sensing scenes, but most of the methods using CNN for high-resolution RSSOR either use only the feature map of the last layer or directly fuse the feature maps from various layers in the “summation” way, which not only ignores the favorable relationship information between adjacent layers but also leads to redundancy and loss of feature map, which hinders the improvement of recognition accuracy. In this study, a contextual, relational attention-based recognition network (CRABR-Net) was presented, which extracts different convolutional feature maps from CNN, focuses important feature content by using a simple, parameter-free attention module (SimAM), fuses the adjacent feature maps by using the complementary relationship feature map calculation, improves the feature learning ability by using the enhanced relationship feature map calculation, and finally uses the concatenated feature maps from different layers for RSSOR. Experimental results show that CRABR-Net exploits the relationship between the different CNN layers to improve recognition performance, achieves better results compared to several state-of-the-art algorithms, and the average accuracy on AID, UC-Merced, and RSSCN7 can be up to 96.46%, 99.20%, and 95.43% with generic training ratios.