Multi-branch convolutional descriptors for content-based remote sensing image retrieval

Context-based remote sensing image retrieval (CBRSIR) is an important problem in computer vision with many applications such as military, agriculture, and surveillance. In this study, inspired by recent developments in person re-identification, we design and fine-tune a multi-branch deep learning architecture that combines global and local features to obtain rich and discriminative image representations. Additionally, we propose a new evaluation strategy that fully separates the test and training sets and where new unseen data is used for querying, thereby emphasizing the generalization capability of retrieval systems. Extensive evaluations show that our method significantly outperforms the existing approaches by up to 10.7% in mean precision@20 on popular CBRSIR datasets. Regarding the new evaluation strategy, our method attains excellent retrieval performance, yielding more than 95% precision@20 score on the challenging PatternNet dataset.