Relational Image Patch Matching for Remote Sensing

Xianwei Cao, Dou Quan, Chonghua Lv, Yanhe Guo, Shuang Wang, Biao Hou, Licheng Jiao

Abstract: Feature descriptor-based methods have demonstrated remarkable performance in remote sensing image patch matching tasks and are usually optimized using contrastive loss and triplet loss. However, these optimization losses focus on calculating the distance between samples, ignoring the rich information of higher-order feature relationships between multiple image patches. The latter provides valuable information that can be used to improve task performance. Inspired by the superior performance of second-order relations in graph matching and clustering tasks, we aim to exploit the rich information available from high-order relations fully. This paper proposes a high-order relationship (HOR) learning method for remote sensing image patch matching. This method combines low-order feature relations between image patch pairs and high-order feature relations between multiple patches to enhance image matching performance. Extensive experimental results on a multimodel remote sensing image dataset, SEN 1-2, consisting of optical and SAR images, demonstrate that the proposed HOR learning method can improve the performance of remote sensing image patch matching.