Deep noise-tolerant hashing for remote sensing image retrieval
Chunyu Yan, Lei Wang, Qibing Qin, Qibing Qin, Jiangyan Dai, Wenfeng Zhang · Signal Processing Image Communication · 2025
Currently, how to quickly retrieve target images from large-scale remote sensing data has emerged as a critical challenge in the context of explosive growth of remote sensing data volume. To deal with this challenge, hash learning becomes an ideal choice with its low storage cost and high efficiency. In recent years, the combination of hash learning with deep neural networks such as CNNs and Transformers has resulted in numerous frameworks demonstrating excellent performance. However, in the field of remote sensing image hashing, previous studies cannot simultaneously consider the effect of noise in feature extraction and loss optimization, so that their retrieval performance is greatly reduced due to noise interference. To resolve the mentioned problem, a Deep Noise-tolerant Hashing (DNtH) framework is proposed to learn the sample complexity and noise level, and adaptively reduce the weight of noisy information. Specifically, to realize the extraction of fine-grained features from information containing irrelevant samples, the noise-aware Transformer is proposed by introducing the patch-wise attention and depth-wise convolution. To reduce the interference of noisy labels on remote sensing image retrieval, an adaptive active-passive loss framework is proposed to dynamically adjust the weights of active passive loss, which learns the weight parameters through a dynamic weighted network while combining with asymmetric strategy for effective compact representation learning. The ratio of entropy to standard deviation and the probability difference are input into the above network and trained with the feature extraction network. Extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets show that the DNtH framework can adapt to noisy environments while achieving optimal performance in remote sensing image retrieval. The source code for the implementation of our DNtH framework is available at https://github.com/QinLab-WFU/DNtH.git .