Diffusion-Noise-Based Augmentation for Long-Tailed Remote Sensing Image Classification

Remote sensing image classification refers to the task that using algorithms to categorize satellite or aerial imagery into different land cover types. In the real world, long-tailed data distribution is commonly present in remote sensing image classification tasks, causing models to excessively favor sufficient head classes during training and degrading prediction accuracy for scarce tail classes. Although existing methods such as resampling and re-weighting can alleviate the issue of data imbalance to a certain extent, they struggle to sufficiently enhance the diversity of tail class samples. In recent years, some works have begun to use diffusion models to generate diverse samples to balance the class distribution. However, these approaches often overlook the distribution inconsistency between generated and real images, which will hinder the improvement of model performance. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a novel diffusion-noise-based augmentation method (DONA) with a two-stage training process. Before training, our specially designed conditional prompts are used together with the original training set to guide the diffusion model in image generation. Furthermore, we propose two strategies to effectively leverage the generated images, which are applied respectively at the end of the first training stage and during the second training stage. First, we design DiffCam-Mix to fuse the background of the generated data with the foreground of the original data, preserving the essential information of the original real images while incorporating the diversity of the generated ones. Second, we use cosine similarity to minimize the differences between the mixed data and their corresponding original data, further calibrating the distribution of different samples. Extensive experiments on three public datasets—SIRI-WHU-LT, PatternNet-LT, and RSI-CB256-LT—demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.