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Semantics-Aware Hierarchical Consensus Learning for Remote Sensing Image Classification

delete2026-09-07
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OA
AI
G
Giulio Weikmann
G
Gianmarco Perantoni
L
Lorenzo Bruzzone
DOI:10.1109/tgrs.2026.3731443delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Deep learning (DL) has become increasingly important in remote sensing (RS) image classification due to its ability to extract semantic information from complex data. Classification tasks often include predefined label hierarchies that represent the semantic relationships among classes. However, these hierarchies are frequently overlooked, and most approaches focus only on fine-grained classification schemes. In this article, we present a novel Semantics-Aware Hierarchical Consensus (SAHC) approach that integrates hierarchical-level-specific classification heads within a deep network architecture and combines their output through cross-level probability projectors. Direct and projected predictions are fused into a geometric consensus distribution, which is used for self-consistent training and optional hierarchy-aware inference. This mechanism acts as a geometric ensemble that leverages the inherent structure of the hierarchical classification task. The projectors are initialized from the user-defined taxonomy (i.e., the hierarchical label structure) and can be adaptively refined during optimization. The proposed SAHC method is evaluated on two benchmark datasets with different degrees of hierarchical complexity on different tasks, considering varying spectral and spatial resolutions. Experimental results show both the effectiveness of the proposed approach in guiding network learning and the robustness of the hierarchical consensus (HC) for RS image classification tasks. The source code is available at: https://github.com/rslab-unitrento/sahc
Keywords:
Consensus
consistency
deep learning (DL)
hierarchical
multigranularity
multispectral (MS)
remote sensing (RS)
semantics-aware
Sentinel-2 (S2)
time series (TS)
very-high resolution (VHR)

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing cover
IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
IF:
8.6
Papers:
2.2W
Citations:
10.7W

Organization

U
university of trento
Scholars:
323
Papers: 168
Citations: 0
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