Automatic Annotation of Satellite Images via Multifeature Joint Sparse Coding With Spatial Relation Constraint

In this letter, we propose a novel framework for large-satellite-image annotation using multifeature joint sparse coding (MFJSC) with spatial relation constraint. The MFJSC model imposes an l_{1, 2}-mixed-norm regularization on encoded coefficients of features. The regularization will encourage the coefficients to share a common sparsity pattern, which will preserve the cross-feature information and eliminate the constraint that they must have identical coefficients. Spatial dependences between patches of large images are useful for the annotation task but are usually ignored or insufficiently exploited in other methods. In this letter, we design a spatial-relation-constrained classifier to utilize the output of MFJSC and the spatial dependences to annotate images more precisely. Experiments on a data set of 21 land-use classes and QuickBird images show the discriminative power of MFJSC and the effectiveness of our annotation framework.