Tile-Level Annotation of Satellite Images Using Multi-Level Max-Margin Discriminative Random Field

This paper proposes a multi-level max-margin discriminative analysis (M(3)DA) framework, which takes both coarse and fine semantics into consideration, for the annotation of high-resolution satellite images. In order to generate more discriminative topic-level features, the M(3)DA uses the maximum entropy discrimination latent Dirichlet Allocation (MedLDA) model. Moreover, for improving the spatial coherence of visual words neglected by M(3)DA, conditional random field (CRF) is employed to optimize the soft label field composed of multiple label posteriors. The framework of M(3)DA enables one to combine word-level features (generated by support vector machines) and topic-level features (generated by MedLDA) via the bag-of-words representation. The experimental results on high-resolution satellite images have demonstrated that, using the proposed method can not only obtain suitable semantic interpretation, but also improve the annotation performance by taking into account the multi-level semantics and the contextual information.