Fusing Geometric and Semantic Features via Cosine Similarity Cross-Attention for Remote Sensing Scene Classification

High-resolution remote sensing image scene classification (HRRSI-SC) is crucial for obtaining accurate Earth surface information. However, the task remains challenging due to significant background interference, high intra-class variation, and subtle inter-class similarities. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are constrained by their local receptive fields, which limits their ability to capture long-range spatial dependencies. On the other hand, Vision Transformers (e.g., ViT-B-16) excel at global feature extraction but often suffer from high computational complexity and may lack the inherent inductive biases for local feature modeling that CNNs possess. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a cross-level feature complementary classification framework based on Lie Group manifold space, termed CBCAM-LGM. Within the proposed CBCAM-LGM framework, multi-granularity features are first distilled via a global average pooling layer to suppress redundant information. The core of our approach, the cross-level bidirectional complementary attention module (CBCAM), then enables the adaptive fusion of features from both branches through a cross-query attention mechanism. Furthermore, by employing parallel dilated convolutions and a parameter-sharing strategy, the model captures multi-scale contextual information by sharing a single set of convolutional weights, which reduces the computational complexity to merely 1.21 GMACs while preserving multi-scale representation with minimal parameter overhead. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate the model's efficacy, as it achieves a state-of-the-art classification accuracy of 97.81% on the AID, surpassing the ViT-B-16 baseline by 1.63%, while containing only 11.237 million parameters (an 87% reduction). These results collectively affirm that our model presents an efficient solution characterized by high accuracy and low complexity.

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Publication Details

Journal
Sensors
Published
2026-03-04
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/s26051613
Primary Topic
Remote-Sensing Image Classification
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Fusing Geometric and Semantic Features via Cosine Similarity Cross-Attention for Remote Sensing Scene Classification

Xuefei Xu, Chengjun Xu
Sensors
Remote-Sensing Image Classification
article

Fusing Geometric and Semantic Features via Cosine Similarity Cross-Attention for Remote Sensing Scene Classification

Xuefei Xu, Chengjun Xu
article en

Abstract

High-resolution remote sensing image scene classification (HRRSI-SC) is crucial for obtaining accurate Earth surface information. However, the task remains challenging due to significant background interference, high intra-class variation, and subtle inter-class similarities. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are constrained by their local receptive fields, which limits their ability to capture long-range spatial dependencies. On the other hand, Vision Transformers (e.g., ViT-B-16) excel at global feature extraction but often suffer from high computational complexity and may lack the inherent inductive biases for local feature modeling that CNNs possess. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a cross-level feature complementary classification framework based on Lie Group manifold space, termed CBCAM-LGM. Within the proposed CBCAM-LGM framework, multi-granularity features are first distilled via a global average pooling layer to suppress redundant information. The core of our approach, the cross-level bidirectional complementary attention module (CBCAM), then enables the adaptive fusion of features from both branches through a cross-query attention mechanism. Furthermore, by employing parallel dilated convolutions and a parameter-sharing strategy, the model captures multi-scale contextual information by sharing a single set of convolutional weights, which reduces the computational complexity to merely 1.21 GMACs while preserving multi-scale representation with minimal parameter overhead. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate the model's efficacy, as it achieves a state-of-the-art classification accuracy of 97.81% on the AID, surpassing the ViT-B-16 baseline by 1.63%, while containing only 11.237 million parameters (an 87% reduction). These results collectively affirm that our model presents an efficient solution characterized by high accuracy and low complexity.

SensorsVol. 26(5)
Wuhan University (CN), Nanchang Normal University (CN), Shanghai Dianji University (CN), Jiangxi Normal University (CN)
National Natural Science Foundation of China, Natural Science Foundation of Jiangxi Province
Openalex Percentile: Top 44%
Remote-Sensing Image Classification
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