Can Land Cover Classification Models Benefit From Distance-Aware Architectures?

The quantification of predictive uncertainties helps to understand where the existing models struggle to find the correct prediction. A useful quality control tool is the task of detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data by examining the model's predictive uncertainty. For this task, deterministic single forward pass frameworks have recently been established as deep learning models and have shown competitive performance in certain tasks. The unique combination of spectrally normalized weight matrices and residual connection networks with an approximate Gaussian process (GP) output layer can here offer the best trade-off between performance and complexity. We utilize this framework with a refined version that adds spectral batch normalization and an inducing points approximation of the GP for the task of OOD detection in remote sensing image classification. This is an important task in the field of remote sensing, because it provides an evaluation of how reliable the model's predictive uncertainty estimates are. By performing experiments on the benchmark datasets Eurosat and So2Sat LCZ42, we can show the effectiveness of the proposed adaptions to the residual networks (ResNets). Depending on the chosen dataset, the proposed methodology achieves OOD detection performance up to 16% higher than previously considered distance-aware networks. Compared with other uncertainty quantification methodologies, the results are on the same level and exceed them in certain experiments by up to 2%. In particular, spectral batch normalization, which normalizes the batched data as opposed to normalizing the network weights by the spectral normalization (SN), plays a crucial role and leads to performance gains of up to 3% in every single experiment. For reproducibility, the code can be found here: https://github.com/ChrisKo94/DUE_Land_Cover.