Modeling global geometric spatial information for rotation invariant classification of satellite images

The classification of high-resolution satellite images is an open research problem for computer vision research community. In last few decades, the Bag of Visual Word (BoVW) model has been used for the classification of satellite images. In BoVW model, an orderless histogram of visual words without any spatial information is used as image signature. The performance of BoVW model suffers due to this orderless nature and addition of spatial clues are reported beneficial for scene and geographical classification of images. Most of the image representations that can compute image spatial information as are not invariant to rotations. A rotation invariant image representation is considered as one of the main requirement for satellite image classification. This paper presents a novel approach that computes the spatial clues for the histograms of BoVW model that is robust to the image rotations. The spatial clues are calculated by computing the histograms of orthogonal vectors. This is achieved by calculating the magnitude of orthogonal vectors between Pairs of Identical Visual Words (PIVW) relative to the geometric center of an image. The comparative analysis is performed with recently proposed research to obtain the best spatial feature representation for the satellite imagery. We evaluated the proposed research for image classification using three standard image benchmarks of remote sensing. The results and comparisons conducted to evaluate this research show that the proposed approach performs better in terms of classification accuracy for a variety of datasets based on satellite images.