Regression tree CNN for estimation of ground sampling distance based on floating-point representation

The estimation of ground sampling distance (GSD) from a remote sensing image enables measurement of the size of an object as well as more accurate segmentation in the image. In this paper, we propose a regression tree convolutional neural network (CNN) for estimating the value of GSD from an input image. The proposed regression tree CNN consists of a feature extraction CNN and a binomial tree layer. The proposed network first extracts features from an input image. Based on the extracted features, it predicts the GSD value that is represented by the floating-point number with the exponent and its mantissa. They are computed by coarse scale classification and finer scale regression, respectively, resulting in improved results. Experimental results with a Google Earth aerial image dataset and a mixed dataset consisting of eight remote sensing image public datasets with different GSDs show that the proposed network reduces the GSD prediction error rate by 25% compared to a baseline network that directly estimates the GSD.