Deep Relevance Hashing for Remote Sensing Image Retrieval

With the development of remote sensing technologies, the volume of remote sensing data is growing dramatically, making efficient management and retrieval of large-scale remote sensing images increasingly important. Recently, deep hashing for content-based remote sensing image retrieval (CBRSIR) has attracted significant attention due to its computational efficiency and high retrieval accuracy. Although great advancements have been achieved, the imbalance between easy and difficult image pairs during training often limits the model's ability to capture complex similarities and degrades retrieval performance. Additionally, distinguishing images with the same Hamming distance but different categories remains a challenge during the retrieval phase. In this paper, we propose a novel deep relevance hashing (DRH) for remote sensing image retrieval, which consists of a global hash learning model (GHLM) and a local hash re-ranking model (LHRM). The goal of GHLM is to extract global features from RS images and generate compact hash codes for initial ranking. To achieve this, GHLM employs a deep convolutional neural network to extract discriminative representations. A weighted pairwise similarity loss is introduced to emphasize difficult image pairs and reduce the impact of easy ones during training. The LHRM predicts relevance scores for images that share the same Hamming distance with the query to reduce confusion in the retrieval stage. Specifically, we represent the retrieval list as a relevance matrix and employ a lightweight CNN model to learn the relevance scores of image pairs and refine the list. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed DRH method outperforms other deep hashing approaches, confirming its effectiveness in CBRSIR.