Improved SinGAN Integrated with an Attentional Mechanism for Remote Sensing Image Classification

Deep learning is an important research method in the remote sensing field. However, samples of remote sensing images are relatively few in real life, and those with markers are scarce. Many neural networks represented by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can learn from real samples to generate pseudosamples, rather than traditional methods that often require more time and man-power to obtain samples. However, the generated pseudosamples often have poor realism and cannot be reliably used as the basis for various analyses and applications in the field of remote sensing. To address the abovementioned problems, a pseudolabeled sample generation method is proposed in this work and applied to scene classification of remote sensing images. The improved unconditional generative model that can be learned from a single natural image (Improved SinGAN) with an attention mechanism can effectively generate enough pseudolabeled samples from a single remote sensing scene image sample. Pseudosamples generated by the improved SinGAN model have stronger realism and relatively less training time, and the extracted features are easily recognized in the classification network. The improved SinGAN can better identify sub-jects from images with complex ground scenes compared with the original network. This mechanism solves the problem of geographic errors of generated pseudosamples. This study incorporated the generated pseudosamples into training data for the classification experiment. The result showed that the SinGAN model with the integration of the attention mechanism can better guarantee feature extraction of the training data. Thus, the quality of the generated samples is improved and the classification accuracy and stability of the classification network are also enhanced.