Organizations: State Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography, Ocean University of China, Qingdao 266100, China. · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS 39762 USA.
Multi-source remote sensing image classification benefits from complementary spectral and structural information. However, identifying discriminative cross-modal features remains challenging. This letter proposes a Cross-Layer Refinement and Frequency-aware Fusion Network (CRFNet) within a lightweight dual-branch architecture. Specifically, a Cross-Layer Refinement Attention (CLRA) module propagates selected attention relationships across successive layers and employs top relation selection to progressively strengthen discriminative spatial dependencies while suppressing irrelevant responses. Furthermore, a Frequency-aware Complementary Fusion (FCF) module combines frequency-wise interactions with cross-modal channel attention in the Fourier domain. The resulting representations are then converted into spatial-domain gates to selectively modulate complementary features. Experiments on the Houston 2013 and Augsburg datasets demonstrate that the proposed CRFNet consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/oucailab/CRFNet
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Overview of the proposed Cross-Layer Refinement and Frequency-aware Fusion Network (CRFNet) for multi-source remote sensing classification. The dual branches extract features from HSI and SAR/LiDAR data, respectively. Cross-Layer Refinement Attention (CLRA) blocks progressively refine features through cross-layer interactions, while Frequency-aware Complementary Fusion (FCF) modules integrate complementary information across modalities at successive stages.
Fig. 2: Illustration of the Cross-Layer Refinement Attention (CLRA).
Fig. 3: Illustration of the Frequency-aware Complementary Fusion (FCF) module.
Fig. 4: Parameter analysis of CRFNet. (a) Number of CLRA blocks. (b) Ratio in top- k selection.
Class
S 2 ENet
DFINet
AsyFF
ExViT
HCT
MACN
RSCNet
CRFNet
Forest
98.10
97.38
97.56
90.04
97.26
97.84
96.07
96.77
Residential
99.08
98.37
99.16
95.44
98.63
98.73
96.40
97.94
Industrial
12.19
61.31
61.38
34.58
36.61
43.94
78.38
56.48
Low plants
91.78
92.63
83.47
90.68
93.54
94.11
94.08
96.62
Allotment
45.12
49.33
42.64
51.82
51.43
52.39
58.32
61.38
Commercial
1.22
3.54
5.58
28.63
7.97
6.80
1.96
3.24
TABLE I: Classification performance of different methods on the Augsburg dataset. The bold and underline denote the best and second results.
Class
S 2 ENet
DFINet
AsyFF
ExViT
HCT
MACN
RSCNet
CRFNet
Healthy grass
81.48
82.91
82.72
82.72
81.10
82.90
82.53
82.81
Stressed grass
84.68
85.15
83.93
85.15
86.09
100.0
79.98
94.83
Synthetic grass
99.01
99.60
100.0
99.21
99.80
99.80
99.60
100.0
Trees
92.14
92.33
91.95
91.95
98.01
98.11
99.15
97.16
Soil
100.0
99.81
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
99.23
100.0
Water
100.0
100.0
95.80
98.60
95.10
95.80
98.60
95.80
TABLE II: Classification performance of different methods on the Houston2013 dataset. The bold and underline denote the best and second results.
Fig. 5: Qualitative comparison of the classification maps on the Augsburg dataset, with enlarged views of a selected region. (a) Ground truth. (b) S 2 ENet. (c) DFINet. (d) AsyFF. (e) ExViT. (f) HCT. (g) MACN. (h) RSCNet. (i) Proposed CRFNet.
Metric
S 2 ENet
DFINet
AsyFF
ExViT
HCT
MACN
RSCNet
CRFNet
Params (M)
1.7055
0.8460
2.0987
1.8807
4.7811
2.0199
2.8812
0.3492
FLOPs (G)
0.2065
0.12464
0.1789
0.2897
0.0437
0.1672
0.3346
0.0821
TABLE III: Comparison of model complexity on the Augsburg dataset.
CLRA
FCF
Augsburg
Houston2013
×
×
90.71
89.36
×
✓
91.51
92.24
✓
×
91.24
92.03
✓
✓
92.04
93.75
TABLE IV: Ablation experiments. OA (%) is reported.
Remote sensing image understanding uses AI to interpret satellite and aerial imagery for objects, land cover, change, hazards, and spatial relationships.
Deep learning-based methods have achieved significant success in remote sensing Earth observation data analysis. Numerous feature fusion techniques address multimodal remote sensing image classification by integrating global and local features. However, these techniques often struggle to extract structural and detail features from heterogeneous and redundant multimodal images. With the goal of introducing frequency domain learning to model key and sparse detail features, this paper introduces the spatial-spectral-frequency interaction network (S2Fin), which integrates pairwise fusion modules across the spatial, spectral, and frequency domains. Specifically, we propose a high-frequency sparse enhancement transformer that employs sparse spatial-spectral attention to optimize the parameters of the high-frequency filter. Subsequently, a two-level spatial-frequency fusion strategy is introduced, comprising an adaptive frequency channel module that fuses low-frequency structures with enhanced high-frequency details, and a high-frequency resonance mask that emphasizes sharp edges via phase similarity. In addition, a spatial-spectral attention fusion module further enhances feature extraction at intermediate layers of the network. Experiments on four benchmark multimodal datasets with limited labeled data demonstrate that S2Fin performs superior classification, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/HaoLiu-XDU/SSFin.
Hao Liu, Yunhao Gao, Wei Li +3
Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento, 38123 Trento, Italy · School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China · Beijing Key Laboratory of Fractional Signals and Systems, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China +3
Multi-source remote sensing image classification has attracted increasing attention due to the complementary spectral, structural, and geometric information. However, existing methods still suffer from two limitations: insufficient semantic contextual modeling and unreliable feature fusion caused by slight spatial misalignment. To address these issues, we propose a Semantic-Guided Fusion Network (SGFNet) for multi-source remote sensing image classification. Specifically, the Semantic Mixing Convolution Block (SMCB) is designed to dynamically generate semantic-aware convolution kernels according to contextual relationships among feature representations. In addition, the Frequency Modulated Fusion Block (FMFB) is introduced to perform cross-modal interaction in the frequency domain, which effectively alleviates the influence of slight spatial misalignment and improves complementary information fusion. Extensive experiments conducted on the Augsburg and Houston 2018 datasets demonstrate that the proposed SGFNet consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/oucailab/SGFNet .
Yuwei Zhao, Chuanzheng Gong, Baogui Huan +3
State Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography, Ocean University of China, Qingdao 266100, China · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS 39762 USA
Hyperspectral image (HSI) and SAR/LiDAR data offer complementary spectral and structural information for land-cover classification. However, their effective fusion remains challenging due to two major limitations: The spectral redundancy in high-dimensional HSI and the heterogeneous characteristics between multi-source data. To this end, we propose Representative Spectral Correlation Network (RSCNet), a novel multi-source image classification framework specifically designed to address the above challenges through spectral selection and adaptive interaction. The network incorporates two key components: (1) Key Band Selection Module (KBSM) that adaptively selects task-relevant spectral bands from the original HSI under cross-source guidance, thereby alleviating redundancy and mitigating information loss from conventional PCA-based spectral reduction. Moreover, the learned band subset exhibits highly discriminative spectral structures that align with discriminative semantic cues, promoting compact yet expressive representations. (2) Cross-source Adaptive Fusion Module (CAFM) that performs cross-source attention weighting and local-global contextual refinement to enhance cross-source feature interaction. Experiments on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our RSCNet achieves superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining substantially lower computational complexity. Our codes are publicly available at https://github.com/oucailab/RSCNet.
Chuanzheng Gong, Feng Gao, Junyan Lin +2
State Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography, Ocean University of China, Qingdao 266100, China · Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS 39762 USA