Explicable Fine-Grained Aircraft Recognition Via Deep Part Parsing Prior Framework for High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery
提出一种知识驱动的深度学习框架APPEAR，通过显式建模飞机刚性结构为像素级部件解析先验，将飞机分为五个部件，利用部件注意力模块提取几何不变特征，在有限训练数据下提升细粒度识别性能。
Aircraft recognition is crucial in both civil and military fields, and high-spatial resolution remote sensing has emerged as a practical approach. However, existing data-driven methods fail to locate discriminative regions for effective feature extraction due to limited training data, leading to poor recognition performance. To address this issue, we propose a knowledge-driven deep learning method called the explicable aircraft recognition framework based on a part parsing prior (APPEAR). APPEAR explicitly models the aircraft's rigid structure as a pixel-level part parsing prior, dividing it into five parts: 1) the nose; 2) left wing; 3) right wing; 4) fuselage; and 5) tail. This fine-grained prior provides reliable part locations to delineate aircraft architecture and imposes spatial constraints among the parts, effectively reducing the search space for model optimization and identifying subtle interclass differences. A knowledge-driven aircraft part attention (KAPA) module uses this prior to achieving a geometric-invariant representation for identifying discriminative features. Part features are generated by part indexing in a specific order and sequentially embedded into a compact space to obtain a fixed-length representation for each part, invariant to aircraft orientation and scale. The part attention module then takes the embedded part features, adaptively reweights their importance to identify discriminative parts, and aggregates them for recognition. The proposed APPEAR framework is evaluated on two aircraft recognition datasets and achieves superior performance. Moreover, experiments with few-shot learning methods demonstrate the robustness of our framework in different tasks. Ablation analysis illustrates that the fuselage and wings of the aircraft are the most effective parts for recognition.