Toward Multilabel Image Retrieval for Remote Sensing

The availability of large-scale remote sensing (RS) data facilitates a wide range of applications, such as disaster management and urban planning. An approach for such problems is image retrieval, where, given a query image, the goal is to find the most relevant match from a database. Most RS literature has been focused on single-label retrieval, where we assume an image has a single label. The primary challenge in single-label RS retrieval is that performance in most datasets is saturated, and it has become difficult to compare the performance of different methods. In this work, we extend the major multilabel classification datasets to the multilabel retrieval problem. We also define protocols, provide evaluation metrics, and study the impact of commonly used loss functions and reranking methods for multilabel retrieval. To this end, a novel multilabel loss function and a reranking technique are proposed, which circumvent the challenges present in conventional single-label image retrieval. The developed loss function considers both class and feature similarity. The proposed reranking technique achieves high performance with computation cost that is well-suited for fast online retrieval.