A Semi-supervised Segmentation Fusion algorithm is proposed using consensus and distributed learning. The aim of Unsupervised Segmentation Fusion (USF) is to achieve a consensus among different segmentation outputs obtained from different segmentation algorithms by computing an approximate solution to the NP problem with less computational complexity. Semi-supervision is incorporated in USF using a new algorithm called Semi-supervised Segmentation Fusion (SSSF). In SSSF, side information about the co-occurrence of pixels in the same or different segments is formulated as the constraints of a convex optimization problem. The results of the experiments employed on artificial and real-world benchmark multi-spectral and aerial images show that the proposed algorithms perform better than the individual state-of-the art segmentation algorithms.
Primary object segmentation plays an important role in understanding videos generated by unmanned aerial vehicles. In this paper, we propose a large-scale dataset with 500 aerial videos and manually annotated primary objects. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest dataset to date for primary object segmentation in aerial videos. From this dataset, we find most aerial videos contain large-scale scenes, small primary objects as well as consistently varying scales and viewpoints. Inspired by that, we propose a hierarchical deep co-segmentation approach that repeatedly divides a video int…
LINKS Foundation（LINKS基金会）；CINI - Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale per l’Informatica（意大利国家信息学大学联盟）；Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学）
We investigate the task of unsupervised domain adaptation in aerial semantic segmentation and discover that the current state-of-the-art algorithms designed for autonomous driving based on domain mixing do not translate well to the aerial setting. This is due to two factors: (i) a large disparity in the extension of the semantic categories, which causes a domain imbalance in the mixed image, and (ii) a weaker structural consistency in aerial scenes than in driving scenes since the same scene might be viewed from different perspectives and there is no well-defined and repeatable structure of th…
Aerial imagery can be used for important work on a global scale. Nevertheless, the analysis of this data using neural network architectures lags behind the current state-of-the-art on popular datasets such as PASCAL VOC, CityScapes and Camvid. In this paper we bridge the performance-gap between these popular datasets and aerial imagery data. Little work is done on aerial imagery with state-of-the-art neural network architectures in a multi-class setting. Our experiments concerning data augmentation, normalisation, image size and loss functions give insight into a high performance setup for aer…
Accurate segmentation of power lines in aerial images is essential to ensure the flight safety of aerial vehicles. Acquiring high-quality ground truth annotations for training a deep learning model is a laborious process. Therefore, developing algorithms that can leverage knowledge from labelled synthetic data to unlabelled real images is highly demanded. This process is studied in Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Recent approaches to self-training have achieved remarkable performance in UDA for semantic segmentation, which trains a model with pseudo labels on the target domain. However, …
Prince Sultan University（苏丹王子大学）；King Saud University（沙特国王大学）；Gaitech Robotics（盖特机器人公司）；Polytechnic Institute of Porto（波尔图理工学院）；University of Carthage（迦太基大学）；National Engineering School of Carthage（迦太基国家工程学院）
Segmenting aerial images is being of great potential in surveillance and scene understanding of urban areas. It provides a mean for automatic reporting of the different events that happen in inhabited areas. This remarkably promotes public safety and traffic management applications. After the wide adoption of convolutional neural networks methods, the accuracy of semantic segmentation algorithms could easily surpass 80% if a robust dataset is provided. Despite this success, the deployment of a pre-trained segmentation model to survey a new city that is not included in the training set signific…
Leveraging Self-Supervised Features for Efficient Flooded Region Identification in UAV Aerial Images
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India（电子与通信工程系，Manipal理工学院，Manipal高等教育学院，Manipal，印度）
University Politehnica of Bucharest（布加勒斯特理工大学）；Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy（罗马尼亚科学院数学研究所）
Semantic segmentation is a crucial task for robot navigation and safety. However, current supervised methods require a large amount of pixelwise annotations to yield accurate results. Labeling is a tedious and time consuming process that has hampered progress in low altitude UAV applications. This paper makes an important step towards automatic annotation by introducing SegProp, a novel iterative flow-based method, with a direct connection to spectral clustering in space and time, to propagate the semantic labels to frames that lack human annotations. The labels are further used in semi-superv…
deadtrees.earth-aerial: A Multi-Resolution Aerial Image Dataset for Tree Cover and Mortality Detection
Chair of Sensor-based Geoinformatics, University of Freiburg（传感器基于地理信息学系，弗赖堡大学）；EcoVision Lab, DM3L, University of Zurich（生态视觉实验室，苏黎世大学）；Institute for Earth System Science and Remote Sensing, Leipzig University（地球系统科学与遥感研究所，莱比锡大学）；Washington University, St. Louis（斯蒂芬斯敦大学）
Self-Supervised Pretraining for Aerial Road Extraction
FZI Research Center for Information Technology（FZI信息技术研究中心）；Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院应用信息学与形式化描述方法研究所）
Due to their ability to offer more comprehensive information than data from a single view, multi-view (multi-source, multi-modal, multi-perspective, etc.) data are being used more frequently in remote sensing tasks. However, as the number of views grows, the issue of data quality becomes more apparent, limiting the potential benefits of multi-view data. Although recent deep neural network (DNN) based models can learn the weight of data adaptively, a lack of research on explicitly quantifying the data quality of each view when fusing them renders these models inexplicable, performing unsatisfac…
This paper proposes a novel domain adaptation algorithm to handle the challenges posed by the satellite and aerial imagery, and demonstrates its effectiveness on the built-up region segmentation problem. Built-up area estimation is an important component in understanding the human impact on the environment, the effect of public policy, and general urban population analysis. The diverse nature of aerial and satellite imagery and lack of labeled data covering this diversity makes machine learning algorithms difficult to generalize for such tasks, especially across multiple domains. On the other …
Université de Rouen Normandie（鲁昂诺曼底大学）；INSA de Rouen（鲁昂国立应用科学学院）；Normandie Univ（诺曼底大学）；Henri Becquerel Cancer Center（亨利·贝克勒尔癌症中心）
In the field of multimodal segmentation, the correlation between different modalities can be considered for improving the segmentation results. Considering the correlation between different MR modalities, in this paper, we propose a multi-modality segmentation network guided by a novel tri-attention fusion. Our network includes N model-independent encoding paths with N image sources, a tri-attention fusion block, a dual-attention fusion block, and a decoding path. The model independent encoding paths can capture modality-specific features from the N modalities. Considering that not all the fea…
Accurate segmentation of power lines in various aerial images is very important for UAV flight safety. The complex background and very thin structures of power lines, however, make it an inherently difficult task in computer vision. This paper presents PLGAN, a simple yet effective method based on generative adversarial networks, to segment power lines from aerial images with different backgrounds. Instead of directly using the adversarial networks to generate the segmentation, we take their certain decoding features and embed them into another semantic segmentation network by considering more…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Research Institute of Frontier Technologies（阿里巴巴-浙江大学前沿技术联合研究院）
Box-supervised instance segmentation has recently attracted lots of research efforts while little attention is received in aerial image domain. In contrast to the general object collections, aerial objects have large intra-class variances and inter-class similarity with complex background. Moreover, there are many tiny objects in the high-resolution satellite images. This makes the recent pairwise affinity modeling method inevitably to involve the noisy supervision with the inferior results. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel aerial instance segmentation approach, which drives the ne…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
This paper proposes a Rotation-equivariant Attention Feature Fusion Pyramid Networks for Aerial Object Detection named ReAFFPN. ReAFFPN aims at improving the effect of rotation-equivariant features fusion between adjacent layers which suffers from the semantic and scale discontinuity. Due to the particularity of rotational equivariant convolution, general methods are unable to achieve their original effect while ensuring rotation equivariance of the network. To solve this problem, we design a new Rotation-equivariant Channel Attention which has the ability to both generate channel attention an…
Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System, Peking University（北京大学遥感与地理信息系统研究所）
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is an approach to minimizing domain gap. Generative methods are common approaches to minimizing the domain gap of aerial images which improves the performance of the downstream tasks, e.g., cross-domain semantic segmentation. For aerial images, the digital surface model (DSM) is usually available in both the source domain and the target domain. Depth information in DSM brings external information to generative models. However, little research utilizes it. In this paper, depth-assisted ResiDualGAN (DRDG) is proposed where depth supervised loss (DSL), and dep…
Aerial images are often taken under poor lighting conditions and contain low resolution objects, many times occluded by other objects. In this domain, visual context could be of great help, but there are still very few papers that consider context in aerial image understanding and still remains an open problem in computer vision. We propose a dual-stream deep neural network that processes information along two independent pathways. Our model learns to combine local and global appearance in a complementary way, such that together form a powerful classifier. We test our dual-stream network on th…
This paper presents our contribution to the DeepGlobe Building Detection Challenge. We enhanced the SpaceNet Challenge winning solution by proposing a new fusion strategy based on a deep combiner using segmentation both results of different CNN and input data to segment. Segmentation results for all cities have been significantly improved (between 1% improvement over the baseline for the smallest one to more than 7% for the largest one). The separation of adjacent buildings should be the next enhancement made to the solution.
Building extraction from aerial images has several applications in problems such as urban planning, change detection, and disaster management. With the increasing availability of data, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for semantic segmentation of remote sensing imagery has improved significantly in recent years. However, convolutions operate in local neighborhoods and fail to capture non-local features that are essential in semantic understanding of aerial images. In this work, we propose to improve building segmentation of different sizes by capturing long-range dependencies using context…
Low light conditions in aerial images adversely affect the performance of several vision based applications. There is a need for methods that can efficiently remove the low light attributes and assist in the performance of key vision tasks. In this work, we propose a new method that is capable of enhancing the low light image in a self-supervised fashion, and sequentially apply detection and segmentation tasks in an end-to-end manner. The proposed method occupies a very small overhead in terms of memory and computational power over the original algorithm and delivers superior results. Addition…
In this paper, we study the problem of efficiently assessing building damage after natural disasters like hurricanes, floods or fires, through aerial video analysis. We make two main contributions. The first contribution is a new dataset, consisting of user-generated aerial videos from social media with annotations of instance-level building damage masks. This provides the first benchmark for quantitative evaluation of models to assess building damage using aerial videos. The second contribution is a new model, namely MSNet, which contains novel region proposal network designs and an unsupervi…
Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (MOE), Peking University（北京大学（MOE）机器感知重点实验室）；NLPR, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所NLPR）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
Aerial Image Segmentation is a particular semantic segmentation problem and has several challenging characteristics that general semantic segmentation does not have. There are two critical issues: The one is an extremely foreground-background imbalanced distribution, and the other is multiple small objects along with the complex background. Such problems make the recent dense affinity context modeling perform poorly even compared with baselines due to over-introduced background context. To handle these problems, we propose a point-wise affinity propagation module based on the Feature Pyramid N…
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of South Carolina, USA（南卡罗来纳大学电气工程系，美国）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina, USA（南卡罗来纳大学计算机科学与工程系，美国）
Accurate detection and segmentation of transmission towers~(TTs) and power lines~(PLs) from aerial images plays a key role in protecting power-grid security and low-altitude UAV safety. Meanwhile, aerial images of TTs and PLs pose a number of new challenges to the computer vision researchers who work on object detection and segmentation -- PLs are long and thin, and may show similar color as the background; TTs can be of various shapes and most likely made up of line structures of various sparsity; The background scene, lighting, and object sizes can vary significantly from one image to anothe…
Semantic segmentation has achieved significant advances in recent years. While deep neural networks perform semantic segmentation well, their success rely on pixel level supervision which is expensive and time-consuming. Further, training using data from one domain may not generalize well to data from a new domain due to a domain gap between data distributions in the different domains. This domain gap is particularly evident in aerial images where visual appearance depends on the type of environment imaged, season, weather, and time of day when the environment is imaged. Subsequently, this dis…
Edge-guided and Class-balanced Active Learning for Semantic Segmentation of Aerial Images
School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Engineering Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学工程科学学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University（安徽大学计算机科学与技术学院）
School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机学院）；Systems and Shanghai Key Laboratory of Data Science, Fudan University（复旦大学系统与上海数据科学重点实验室）；Shanghai Insitute of Intelligent Electroics & Systems（上海智能电子与系统研究所）；Bytedance AI Lab（字节跳动AI实验室）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）
Automatic map extraction is of great importance to urban computing and location-based services. Aerial image and GPS trajectory data refer to two different data sources that could be leveraged to generate the map, although they carry different types of information. Most previous works on data fusion between aerial images and data from auxiliary sensors do not fully utilize the information of both modalities and hence suffer from the issue of information loss. We propose a deep convolutional neural network called DeepDualMapper which fuses the aerial image and trajectory data in a more seamless…
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心（DLR））；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
The knowledge about the placement and appearance of lane markings is a prerequisite for the creation of maps with high precision, necessary for autonomous driving, infrastructure monitoring, lane-wise traffic management, and urban planning. Lane markings are one of the important components of such maps. Lane markings convey the rules of roads to drivers. While these rules are learned by humans, an autonomous driving vehicle should be taught to learn them to localize itself. Therefore, accurate and reliable lane marking semantic segmentation in the imagery of roads and highways is needed to ach…
Manipal Institute of Technology（马尼帕尔理工学院）；Manipal Academy of Higher Education（马尼帕尔高等教育学院）
Semantic segmentation of aerial videos has been extensively used for decision making in monitoring environmental changes, urban planning, and disaster management. The reliability of these decision support systems is dependent on the accuracy of the video semantic segmentation algorithms. The existing CNN based video semantic segmentation methods have enhanced the image semantic segmentation methods by incorporating an additional module such as LSTM or optical flow for computing temporal dynamics of the video which is a computational overhead. The proposed research work modifies the CNN archite…
DUFormer: Solving Power Line Detection Task in Aerial Images using Semantic Segmentation
Autel Robotics（道通智能）；Fujian College, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学福建学院）；Quanzhou Institute of Equipment Manufacturing, Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院福建物质结构研究所泉州装备制造研究所）；Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University（福建农林大学）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）
UAVs showed great efficiency on scanning bridge decks surface by taking a single shot or through stitching a couple of overlaid still images. If potential surface deficits are identified through aerial images, subsequent ground inspections can be scheduled. This two-phase inspection procedure showed great potentials on increasing field inspection productivity. Since aerial and ground inspection images are taken at different scales, a tool to properly fuse these multi-scale images is needed for improving the current bridge deck condition monitoring practice. In response to this need a data fusi…
High-resolution aerial images have a wide range of applications, such as military exploration, and urban planning. Semantic segmentation is a fundamental method extensively used in the analysis of high-resolution aerial images. However, the ground objects in high-resolution aerial images have the characteristics of inconsistent scales, and this feature usually leads to unexpected predictions. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel scale-aware module (SAM). In SAM, we employ the re-sampling method aimed to make pixels adjust their positions to fit the ground objects with different scales, and…
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Cyclomedia B.V（Cyclomedia公司）
Detection of buildings and other objects from aerial images has various applications in urban planning and map making. Automated building detection from aerial imagery is a challenging task, as it is prone to varying lighting conditions, shadows and occlusions. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are robust against some of these variations, although they fail to distinguish easy and difficult examples. We train a detection algorithm from RGB-D images to obtain a segmented mask by using the CNN architecture DenseNet.First, we improve the performance of the model by applying a statistical re-sa…
The automated segmentation of buildings in remote sensing imagery is a challenging task that requires the accurate delineation of multiple building instances over typically large image areas. Manual methods are often laborious and current deep-learning-based approaches fail to delineate all building instances and do so with adequate accuracy. As a solution, we present Trainable Deep Active Contours (TDACs), an automatic image segmentation framework that intimately unites Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Active Contour Models (ACMs). The Eulerian energy functional of the ACM component i…
COSTA: A Cluster-Centric Paradigm for Annotation-Free Open-Set Semantic Segmentation of Aerial Point Clouds with Domain Shifts
Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院福建物质结构研究所）；Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院城市环境研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；School of Resource and Environmental Sciences, Wuhan University（武汉大学资源与环境科学学院）
Nomoko AG（Nomoko股份公司）；The Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA)（达莱莫勒人工智能研究所（IDSIA））
We introduce a new outdoor urban 3D pointcloud dataset, covering a total area of 2.7 $km^2$, sampled from three Swiss cities with different characteristics. The dataset is manually annotated for semantic segmentation with per-point labels, and is built using photogrammetry from images acquired by multirotors equipped with high-resolution cameras. In contrast to datasets acquired with ground LiDAR sensors, the resulting point clouds are uniformly dense and complete, and are useful to disparate applications, including autonomous driving, gaming and smart city planning. As a benchmark, we report …
We introduce a novel strategy for learning to extract semantically meaningful features from aerial imagery. Instead of manually labeling the aerial imagery, we propose to predict (noisy) semantic features automatically extracted from co-located ground imagery. Our network architecture takes an aerial image as input, extracts features using a convolutional neural network, and then applies an adaptive transformation to map these features into the ground-level perspective. We use an end-to-end learning approach to minimize the difference between the semantic segmentation extracted directly from t…
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais（米纳斯吉拉斯联邦大学）；University of Stirling（斯特灵大学）
Classical and more recently deep computer vision methods are optimized for visible spectrum images, commonly encoded in grayscale or RGB colorspaces acquired from smartphones or cameras. A more uncommon source of images exploited in the remote sensing field are satellite and aerial images. However, the development of pattern recognition approaches for these data is relatively recent, mainly due to the limited availability of this type of images, as until recently they were used exclusively for military purposes. Access to aerial imagery, including spectral information, has been increasing main…
UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles): Diverse Applications of UAV Datasets in Segmentation, Classification, Detection, and Tracking
Silicon Orchard Research and Analytics Lab（Silicon Orchard 研究与分析实验室）；Daffodil International University（水仙花国际大学）；BRAC University（BRAC 大学）；Texas Tech University（德克萨斯理工大学）；Clark Atlanta University（克拉克亚特兰大大学）
Object detection and classification using aerial images is a challenging task as the information regarding targets are not abundant. Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) images can be used for Automatic Target Recognition(ATR) systems as it can operate in all-weather conditions and in low light settings. But, SAR images contain salt and pepper noise(speckle noise) that cause hindrance for the deep learning models to extract meaningful features. Using just aerial view Electro-optical(EO) images for ATR systems may also not result in high accuracy as these images are of low resolution and also do not p…
