Scene classification is a key problem in the interpretation of high-resolution remote sensing imagery. Many state-of-the-art methods, e.g. bag-of-visual-words model and its variants, the topic models as well as deep learning-based approaches, share similar procedures: patch sampling, feature description/learning and classification. Patch sampling is the first and a key procedure which has a great influence on the results. In the literature, many different sampling strategies have been used, {e.g. dense sampling, random sampling, keypoint-based sampling and saliency-based sampling, etc. However, it is still not clear which sampling strategy is suitable for the scene classification of high-resolution remote sensing images. In this paper, we comparatively study the effects of different sampling strategies under the scenario of scene classification of high-resolution remote sensing images. We divide the existing sampling methods into two types: dense sampling and sparse sampling, the later of which includes random sampling, keypoint-based sampling and various saliency-based sampling proposed recently. In order to compare their performances, we rely on a standard bag-of-visual-words model to construct our testing scheme, owing to their simplicity, robustness and efficiency. The experimental results on two commonly used datasets show that dense sampling has the best performance among all the strategies but with high spatial and computational complexity, random sampling gives better or comparable results than other sparse sampling methods, like the sophisticated multi-scale key-point operators and the saliency-based methods which are intensively studied and commonly used recently.
Thanks to recent advances in CNNs, solid improvements have been made in semantic segmentation of high resolution remote sensing imagery. However, most of the previous works have not fully taken into account the specific difficulties that exist in remote sensing tasks. One of such difficulties is that objects are small and crowded in remote sensing imagery. To tackle with this challenging task we have proposed a novel architecture called local feature extraction (LFE) module attached on top of dilated front-end module. The LFE module is based on our findings that aggressively increasing dilatio…
Pan-sharpening is a fundamental and significant task in the field of remote sensing imagery processing, in which high-resolution spatial details from panchromatic images are employed to enhance the spatial resolution of multi-spectral (MS) images. As the transformation from low spatial resolution MS image to high-resolution MS image is complex and highly non-linear, inspired by the powerful representation for non-linear relationships of deep neural networks, we introduce multi-scale feature extraction and residual learning into the basic convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture and prop…
Self-supervision based deep learning classification approaches have received considerable attention in academic literature. However, the performance of such methods on remote sensing imagery domains remains under-explored. In this work, we explore contrastive representation learning methods on the task of imagery-based city classification, an important problem in urban computing. We use satellite and map imagery across 2 domains, 3 million locations and more than 1500 cities. We show that self-supervised methods can build a generalizable representation from as few as 200 cities, with represent…
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术学院）；Ulm University（乌尔姆大学）
For many countries like Russia, Canada, or the USA, a robust and detailed tree species inventory is essential to manage their forests sustainably. Since one can not apply unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery-based approaches to large-scale forest inventory applications, the utilization of machine learning algorithms on satellite imagery is a rising topic of research. Although satellite imagery quality is relatively low, additional spectral channels provide a sufficient amount of information for tree crown classification tasks. Assuming that tree crowns are detected already, we use embeddings …
Land-cover classification using remote sensing imagery is an important Earth observation task. Recently, land cover classification has benefited from the development of fully connected neural networks for semantic segmentation. The benchmark datasets available for training deep segmentation models in remote sensing imagery tend to be small, however, often consisting of only a handful of images from a single location with a single scale. This limits the models' ability to generalize to other datasets. Domain adaptation has been proposed to improve the models' generalization but we find these ap…
Optical remote sensing imagery has been widely used in many fields due to its high resolution and stable geometric properties. However, remote sensing imagery is inevitably affected by climate, especially clouds. Removing the cloud in the high-resolution remote sensing satellite image is an indispensable pre-processing step before analyzing it. For the sake of large-scale training data, neural networks have been successful in many image processing tasks, but the use of neural networks to remove cloud in remote sensing imagery is still relatively small. We adopt generative adversarial network t…
Sustainability of the global environment is dependent on the accurate land cover information over large areas. Even with the increased number of satellite systems and sensors acquiring data with improved spectral, spatial, radiometric and temporal characteristics and the new data distribution policy, most existing land cover datasets were derived from a pixel-based single-date multi-spectral remotely sensed image with low accuracy. To improve the accuracy, the bottleneck is how to develop an accurate and effective image classification technique. By incorporating and utilizing the complete mult…
Recently, the availability of remote sensing imagery from aerial vehicles and satellites constantly improved. For an automated interpretation of such data, deep-learning-based object detectors achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, established object detectors require complete, precise, and correct bounding box annotations for training. In order to create the necessary training annotations for object detectors, imagery can be georeferenced and combined with data from other sources, such as points of interest localized by GPS sensors. Unfortunately, this combination often leads to poor …
SatelliteFormula: Multi-Modal Symbolic Regression from Remote Sensing Imagery for Physics Discovery
Universiti Malaya（马来大学）；Kunming University of Science and Technology（昆明理工大学）；Yunnan Normal University（云南师范大学）；Guangming Laboratory（光明实验室）；University of Central Florida（佛罗里达大学）
Semantic segmentation is a key technique involved in automatic interpretation of high-resolution remote sensing (HRS) imagery and has drawn much attention in the remote sensing community. Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have been successfully applied to the HRS imagery semantic segmentation task due to their hierarchical representation ability. However, the heavy dependency on a large number of training data with dense annotation and the sensitiveness to the variation of data distribution severely restrict the potential application of DCNNs for the semantic segmentation of HRS image…
The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI)（荷兰皇家气象研究所）；University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Environment Protection Authority Victoria（维多利亚州环境保护局）
Analysis of overhead imagery using computer vision is a problem that has received considerable attention in academic literature. Most techniques that operate in this space are both highly specialised and require expensive manual annotation of large datasets. These problems are addressed here through the development of a more generic framework, incorporating advances in representation learning which allows for more flexibility in analysing new categories of imagery with limited labeled data. First, a robust representation of an unlabeled aerial imagery dataset was created based on the momentum …
With the development of remote sensing technology, the acquisition of remote sensing images is easier and easier, which provides sufficient data resources for the task of detecting remote sensing objects. However, how to detect objects quickly and accurately from many complex optical remote sensing images is a challenging hot issue. In this paper, we propose an efficient anchor free object detector, CenterFPANet. To pursue speed, we use a lightweight backbone and introduce the asymmetric revolution block. To improve the accuracy, we designed the FPA module, which links the feature maps of diff…
New York University（纽约大学）；University of the Philippines Diliman（菲律宾大学迪里曼分校）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；German Corporation for International Cooperation GmbH (GIZ)（德国国际合作机构（GIZ））
Rapid damage assessment is of crucial importance to emergency responders during hurricane events, however, the evaluation process is often slow, labor-intensive, costly, and error-prone. New advances in computer vision and remote sensing open possibilities to observe the Earth at a different scale. However, substantial pre-processing work is still required in order to apply state-of-the-art methodology for emergency response. To enable the comparison of methods for automatic detection of damaged buildings from post-hurricane remote sensing imagery taken from both airborne and satellite sensors…
Self-guided Few-shot Semantic Segmentation for Remote Sensing Imagery Based on Large Vision Models
Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院空天信息创新研究院）；School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学电子电气与通信工程学院）
Building coverage statistics provide crucial insights into the urbanization, infrastructure, and poverty level of a region, facilitating efforts towards alleviating poverty, building sustainable cities, and allocating infrastructure investments and public service provision. Global mapping of buildings has been made more efficient with the incorporation of deep learning models into the pipeline. However, these models typically rely on high-resolution satellite imagery which are expensive to collect and infrequently updated. As a result, building coverage data are not updated timely especially i…
Accurate and robust detection of multi-class objects in optical remote sensing images is essential to many real-world applications such as urban planning, traffic control, searching and rescuing, etc. However, state-of-the-art object detection techniques designed for images captured using ground-level sensors usually experience a sharp performance drop when directly applied to remote sensing images, largely due to the object appearance differences in remote sensing images in term of sparse texture, low contrast, arbitrary orientations, large scale variations, etc. This paper presents a novel o…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）；Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学）；Univ. Grenoble Alpes（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Grenoble INP（格勒诺布尔国立高等物理、数学与信息学院）；University of Iceland（冰岛大学）
With the rapid development of spaceborne imaging techniques, object detection in optical remote sensing imagery has drawn much attention in recent decades. While many advanced works have been developed with powerful learning algorithms, the incomplete feature representation still cannot meet the demand for effectively and efficiently handling image deformations, particularly objective scaling and rotation. To this end, we propose a novel object detection framework, called optical remote sensing imagery detector (ORSIm detector), integrating diverse channel features extraction, feature learning…
UniDiff: Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Diffusion Models for Land Cover Classification with Multi-Modal Remotely Sensed Imagery and Sparse Annotations
SatMamba: Development of Foundation Models for Remote Sensing Imagery Using State Space Models
University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University（越南国家大学工程技术大学）；International Digital Earth Applied Science Research Center, Chubu University（中部大学国际数字地球应用科学研究中心）
In this work we consider the application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for pixel-wise labeling (a.k.a., semantic segmentation) of remote sensing imagery (e.g., aerial color or hyperspectral imagery). Remote sensing imagery is usually stored in the form of very large images, referred to as "tiles", which are too large to be segmented directly using most CNNs and their associated hardware. As a result, during label inference, smaller sub-images, called "patches", are processed individually and then "stitched" (concatenated) back together to create a tile-sized label map. This approach …
Geo-informatics and Space Technology Development Agency (GISTDA)（地理信息与空间技术发展局）
Traditional image classification techniques often produce unsatisfactory results when applied to high spatial resolution data because classes in high resolution images are not spectrally homogeneous. Texture offers an alternative source of information for classifying these images. This paper evaluates a recently developed, computationally simple texture metric called Weber Local Descriptor (WLD) for use in classifying high resolution QuickBird panchromatic data. We compared WLD with state-of-the art texture descriptors (TD) including Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and its rotation-invariant versio…
Recent advances in computer vision using deep learning with RGB imagery (e.g., object recognition and detection) have been made possible thanks to the development of large annotated RGB image datasets. In contrast, multispectral image (MSI) and hyperspectral image (HSI) datasets contain far fewer labeled images, in part due to the wide variety of sensors used. These annotations are especially limited for semantic segmentation, or pixel-wise classification, of remote sensing imagery because it is labor intensive to generate image annotations. Low-shot learning algorithms can make effective infe…
The trend towards higher resolution remote sensing imagery facilitates a transition from land-use classification to object-level scene understanding. Rather than relying purely on spectral content, appearance-based image features come into play. In this work, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are applied to semantic labelling of high-resolution remote sensing data. Recent advances in fully convolutional networks (FCNs) are adapted to overhead data and shown to be as effective as in other domains. A full-resolution labelling is inferred using a deep FCN with no downsampling, obviating t…
We propose an automated method to estimate a road segment's free-flow speed from overhead imagery and road metadata. The free-flow speed of a road segment is the average observed vehicle speed in ideal conditions, without congestion or adverse weather. Standard practice for estimating free-flow speeds depends on several road attributes, including grade, curve, and width of the right of way. Unfortunately, many of these fine-grained labels are not always readily available and are costly to manually annotate. To compensate, our model uses a small, easy to obtain subset of road features along wit…
For change detection in remote sensing, constructing a training dataset for deep learning models is difficult due to the requirements of bi-temporal supervision. To overcome this issue, single-temporal supervision which treats change labels as the difference of two semantic masks has been proposed. This novel method trains a change detector using two spatially unrelated images with corresponding semantic labels such as building. However, training on unpaired datasets could confuse the change detector in the case of pixels that are labeled unchanged but are visually significantly different. In …
DB SwinT: A Dual-Branch Swin Transformer Network for Road Extraction in Optical Remote Sensing Imagery
School of Information Science and Engineering（信息科学与工程学院）；Chongqing Jiaotong University（重庆交通大学）；College of Information Engineering（信息工程学院）；Inner Mongolia University of Technology（内蒙古科技大学）；Inner Mongolia Key Laboratory of Radar Technology and Application（内蒙古雷达技术与应用重点实验室）
ReCon1M:A Large-scale Benchmark Dataset for Relation Comprehension in Remote Sensing Imagery
Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院空天信息创新研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学电子电气与通信工程学院）
Carlson Center for Imaging Science, Rochester Institute of Technology（卡尔森成像科学中心，罗切斯特理工学院）
Deep learning continues to push state-of-the-art performance for the semantic segmentation of color (i.e., RGB) imagery; however, the lack of annotated data for many remote sensing sensors (i.e. hyperspectral imagery (HSI)) prevents researchers from taking advantage of this recent success. Since generating sensor specific datasets is time intensive and cost prohibitive, remote sensing researchers have embraced deep unsupervised feature extraction. Although these methods have pushed state-of-the-art performance on current HSI benchmarks, many of these tools are not readily accessible to many re…
Ship detection has been an active and vital topic in the field of remote sensing for a decade, but it is still a challenging problem due to the large scale variations, the high aspect ratios, the intensive arrangement, and the background clutter disturbance. In this letter, we propose a locality-aware rotated ship detection (LARSD) framework based on a multi-scale convolutional neural network (CNN) to tackle these issues. The proposed framework applies a UNet-like multi-scale CNN to generate multi-scale feature maps with high-level semantic information in high resolution. Then, a rotated ancho…
MineNetCD: A Benchmark for Global Mining Change Detection on Remote Sensing Imagery
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR)（德累斯顿-罗森多夫亥姆霍兹研究中心）；Wuhan University of Science and Technology（武汉科技大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）
German Aerospace Center（德国航空航天中心）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Automatic multi-class object detection in remote sensing images in unconstrained scenarios is of high interest for several applications including traffic monitoring and disaster management. The huge variation in object scale, orientation, category, and complex backgrounds, as well as the different camera sensors pose great challenges for current algorithms. In this work, we propose a new method consisting of a novel joint image cascade and feature pyramid network with multi-size convolution kernels to extract multi-scale strong and weak semantic features. These features are fed into rotation-b…
L2RSI: Cross-view LiDAR-based Place Recognition for Large-scale Urban Scenes via Remote Sensing Imagery
Fujian Key Laboratory of Sensing and Computing for Smart Cities, Xiamen University, China（福建智能城市感知与计算重点实验室，厦门大学，中国）；Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Xiamen University, China（多媒体可信感知与高效计算重点实验室，中华人民共和国教育部，厦门大学，中国）；University of Science and Technology of China, China（中国科学技术大学，中国）
