Contextual aerial image categorization using codebook

Effective categorization of the millions of aerial images from unmanned planes is a useful technique with several important applications. Previous methods on this task usually encountered such problems: (1) it is hard to represent the aerial images' topologies efficiently, which are the key feature to distinguish the arial images rather than conventional appearance, and (2) the computational load is usually too high to build a realtime image categorization system. Addressing these problems, this paper proposes an efficient and effective aerial image categorization method based on a contextual topological codebook. The codebook of aerial images is learned with a multitask learning framework. The topology of each aerial image is represented with the region adjacency graph (RAG). Furthermore, a codebook containing topologies is learned by jointly modeling the contextual information, based on the extracted discriminative graphlets. These graphlets are integrated into a Bag-of-Words (BoW) representation for predicting aerial image categories. Contextual relation among local patches are taken into account in categorization to yield high categorization performance. Experimental results show that our approach is both effective and efficient.