Multi-reference source aircraft classification network based on unknown class prototype estimation

Abstract Gathering complete aircraft types for close-set tasks is challenging and costly in fine-grained aircraft classification, resulting in encountering unknown class aircraft images in real-world models. To address this problem, we propose a network called a multi-reference source fine-grained aircraft classification network (MRSN) to explicitly and implicitly distinguish known class boundaries and embed unknown classes into the sample space. Specifically, we propose an embedding module (UCPE) to synthesize an unknown class prototype to facilitate the modeling of unknown class data distribution. Besides, we introduce a concatenated multi-reference source module (CMS) that combines distance measurement and probability estimation to classify whether testing images are of unknown class or not. Our proposed MRSN innovatively extends the open-set learning paradigm to the fine-grained classification of geospatial objects rather than simple scene classification. Besides, it shows excellent performance in our constructed dataset, which demonstrates the effectiveness and progressiveness of our method.