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 dilation factors fails to aggregate local features due to sparsity of the kernel, and detrimental to small objects. The proposed LFE module solves this problem by aggregating local features with decreasing dilation factor. We tested our network on three remote sensing datasets and acquired remarkably good results for all datasets especially for small objects.
SRM Institute of Science and Technology（SRM科学技术学院）
The ship-detection task in satellite imagery presents significant obstacles to even the most state of the art segmentation models due to lack of labelled dataset or approaches which are not able to generalize to unseen images. The most common methods for semantic segmentation involve complex two-stage networks or networks which make use of a multi-scale scene parsing module. In this paper, we propose a modified version of the popular U-Net architecture called Squeeze and Excitation U-Net and train it with a loss that helps in directly optimizing the intersection over union (IoU) score. Our met…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；University of North Texas（北德克萨斯大学）；DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory（DEVCOM陆军研究实验室）
The United States coastline spans 95,471 miles; a distance that cannot be effectively patrolled or secured by manual human effort alone. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with infrared cameras and deep-learning based algorithms represent a more efficient alternative for identifying and segmenting objects of interest - namely, ships. However, standard approaches to training these algorithms require large-scale datasets of densely labeled infrared maritime images. Such datasets are not publicly available and manually annotating every pixel in a large-scale dataset would have an extreme la…
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Bavarian Forest National Park（巴伐利亚森林国家公园）
In this paper, we introduce a framework for segmenting instances of a common object class by multiple active contour evolution over semantic segmentation maps of images obtained through fully convolutional networks. The contour evolution is cast as an energy minimization problem, where the aggregate energy functional incorporates a data fit term, an explicit shape model, and accounts for object overlap. Efficient solution neighborhood operators are proposed, enabling optimization through metaheuristics such as simulated annealing. We instantiate the proposed framework in the context of segment…
Norwegian Computing Center（挪威计算中心）；UiT the Arctic University of Norway（挪威北极大学）
Land cover classification of remote sensing images is a challenging task due to limited amounts of annotated data, highly imbalanced classes, frequent incorrect pixel-level annotations, and an inherent complexity in the semantic segmentation task. In this article, we propose a novel architecture called the dense dilated convolutions' merging network (DDCM-Net) to address this task. The proposed DDCM-Net consists of dense dilated image convolutions merged with varying dilation rates. This effectively utilizes rich combinations of dilated convolutions that enlarge the network's receptive fields …
Khalifa University（哈利法大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；University of Louisville（路易斯维尔大学）
Prostate cancer (PCa) is the second deadliest form of cancer in males, and it can be clinically graded by examining the structural representations of Gleason tissues. This paper proposes \RV{a new method} for segmenting the Gleason tissues \RV{(patch-wise) in order to grade PCa from the whole slide images (WSI).} Also, the proposed approach encompasses two main contributions: 1) A synergy of hybrid dilation factors and hierarchical decomposition of latent space representation for effective Gleason tissues extraction, and 2) A three-tiered loss function which can penalize different semantic seg…
University of Science, Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市自然科学大学）；John von Neumann Institute, Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市约翰·冯·诺依曼研究所）；Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市越南国家大学）；University of Arkansas, Fayetteville（阿肯色大学费耶特维尔分校）
While Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has played an essential role in infant brain analysis, segmenting MRI into a number of tissues such as gray matter (GM), white matter (WM), and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is crucial and complex due to the extremely low intensity contrast between tissues at around 6-9 months of age as well as amplified noise, myelination, and incomplete volume. In this paper, we tackle those limitations by developing a new deep learning model, named DAM-AL, which contains two main contributions, i.e., dilated attention mechanism and hard-case attention loss. Our DAM-AL netw…
Urban areas consume over two-thirds of the world's energy and account for more than 70 percent of global CO2 emissions. As stated in IPCC's Global Warming of 1.5C report, achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 requires a clear understanding of urban geometry. High-quality building footprint generation from satellite images can accelerate this predictive process and empower municipal decision-making at scale. However, previous Deep Learning-based approaches face consequential issues such as scale invariance and defective footprints, partly due to ever-present class-wise imbalance. Additionally, mo…
Automated Linear Disturbance Mapping via Semantic Segmentation of Sentinel-2 Imagery
University of Winnipeg（温尼伯大学）；Hatfield Consultants Group（哈特菲尔德咨询集团）；University of Manitoba（曼尼托巴大学）；Pachama（帕查玛公司）；Environment and Climate Change Canada（加拿大环境与气候变化部）
Enhancing Satellite Object Localization with Dilated Convolutions and Attention-aided Spatial Pooling
Department of Information Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County（信息系统系，马里兰大学巴尔的摩分校）；Department of Physics, Catholic University of America（物理系，天主教美国大学）；NASA Goddard Space Flight Center（NASA戈达德空间飞行中心）
Phenotyping is the process of measuring an organism's observable traits. Manual phenotyping of crops is a labor-intensive, time-consuming, costly, and error prone process. Accurate, automated, high-throughput phenotyping can relieve a huge burden in the crop breeding pipeline. In this paper, we propose a scalable, high-throughput approach to automatically count and segment panicles (heads), a key phenotype, from aerial sorghum crop imagery. Our counting approach uses the image density map obtained from dot or region annotation as the target with a novel deep convolutional neural network archit…
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）；Remote Sensing Technology Institute (IMF), German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心遥感技术研究所）；Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学）
Building segmentation is of great importance in the task of remote sensing imagery interpretation. However, the existing semantic segmentation and instance segmentation methods often lead to segmentation masks with blurred boundaries. In this paper, we propose a novel instance segmentation network for building segmentation in high-resolution remote sensing images. More specifically, we consider segmenting an individual building as detecting several keypoints. The detected keypoints are subsequently reformulated as a closed polygon, which is the semantic boundary of the building. By doing so, t…
Malek-Ashtar University of Technology（马雷克-阿什塔尔理工大学）；Iran University of Science and Technology（伊朗科技大学）；Auckland University of Technology（奥克兰理工大学）；National Ilan University（国立宜兰大学）
This paper presents a novel method to involve both spatial and temporal features for semantic video segmentation. Current work on convolutional neural networks(CNNs) has shown that CNNs provide advanced spatial features supporting a very good performance of solutions for both image and video analysis, especially for the semantic segmentation task. We investigate how involving temporal features also has a good effect on segmenting video data. We propose a module based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture of a recurrent neural network for interpreting the temporal characteristics of v…
Can SAM recognize crops? Quantifying the zero-shot performance of a semantic segmentation foundation model on generating crop-type maps using satellite imagery for precision agriculture
The increasing availability of high-resolution satellite imagery has enabled the use of machine learning to support land-cover measurement and inform policy-making. However, labelling satellite images is expensive and is available for only some locations. This prompts the use of transfer learning to adapt models from data-rich locations to others. Given the potential for high-impact applications of satellite imagery across geographies, a systematic assessment of transfer learning implications is warranted. In this work, we consider the task of land-cover segmentation and study the fairness imp…
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Bavarian Forest National Park（巴伐利亚森林国家公园）；Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg（弗赖堡大学）
The stability and ability of an ecosystem to withstand climate change is directly linked to its biodiversity. Dead trees are a key indicator of overall forest health, housing one-third of forest ecosystem biodiversity, and constitute 8%of the global carbon stocks. They are decomposed by several natural factors, e.g. climate, insects and fungi. Accurate detection and modeling of dead wood mass is paramount to understanding forest ecology, the carbon cycle and decomposers. We present a novel method to construct precise shape contours of dead trees from aerial photographs by combining established…
University of Missouri（密苏里大学）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；Naval Surface Warfare Center（海军水面战中心）
Topic models (e.g., pLSA, LDA, sLDA) have been widely used for segmenting imagery. However, these models are confined to crisp segmentation, forcing a visual word (i.e., an image patch) to belong to one and only one topic. Yet, there are many images in which some regions cannot be assigned a crisp categorical label (e.g., transition regions between a foggy sky and the ground or between sand and water at a beach). In these cases, a visual word is best represented with partial memberships across multiple topics. To address this, we present a partial membership latent Dirichlet allocation (PM-LDA…
Greenhouse segmentation has pivotal importance for climate-smart agricultural land-use planning. Deep learning-based approaches provide state-of-the-art performance in natural image segmentation. However, semantic segmentation on high-resolution optical satellite imagery is a challenging task because of the complex environment. In this paper, a sound methodology is proposed for pixel-wise classification on images acquired by the Azersky (SPOT-7) optical satellite. In particular, customized variations of U-Net-like architectures are employed to identify greenhouses. Two models are proposed whic…
Despite receiving significant attention from the research community, the task of segmenting and tracking objects in monocular videos still has much room for improvement. Existing works have simultaneously justified the efficacy of dilated and deformable convolutions for various image-level segmentation tasks. This gives reason to believe that 3D extensions of such convolutions should also yield performance improvements for video-level segmentation tasks. However, this aspect has not yet been explored thoroughly in existing literature. In this paper, we propose Dynamic Dilated Convolutions (D^2…
1 Department of Computer Science, Friendrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany 2 Department of Geography \& Geosciences, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Fluctuations of the glacier calving front have an important influence over the ice flow of whole glacier systems. It is therefore important to precisely monitor the position of the calving front. However, the manual delineation of SAR images is a difficult, laborious and subjective task. Convolutional neural networks have previously shown promising results in automating the glacier segmentation in SAR images, making them desirable for further exploration of their possibilities. In this work, we propose to compute uncertainty and use it in an Uncertainty Optimization regime as a novel two-stage…
University of Missouri（密苏里大学）；Naval Surface Warfare Center（海军水面作战中心）
Topic models (e.g., pLSA, LDA, SLDA) have been widely used for segmenting imagery. These models are confined to crisp segmentation. Yet, there are many images in which some regions cannot be assigned a crisp label (e.g., transition regions between a foggy sky and the ground or between sand and water at a beach). In these cases, a visual word is best represented with partial memberships across multiple topics. To address this, we present a partial membership latent Dirichlet allocation (PM-LDA) model and associated parameter estimation algorithms. Experimental results on two natural image datas…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；TU Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Kent（肯特大学）；LIST Luxembourg（卢森堡LIST研究所）；DFKI（德国人工智能研究中心）；TU Kaiserslautern（凯泽斯劳滕工业大学）；Czech Geological Survey（捷克地质调查局）；University of Warsaw（华沙大学）
We propose a novel approach for rapid segmentation of flooded buildings by fusing multiresolution, multisensor, and multitemporal satellite imagery in a convolutional neural network. Our model significantly expedites the generation of satellite imagery-based flood maps, crucial for first responders and local authorities in the early stages of flood events. By incorporating multitemporal satellite imagery, our model allows for rapid and accurate post-disaster damage assessment and can be used by governments to better coordinate medium- and long-term financial assistance programs for affected ar…
Extending CAM-based XAI methods for Remote Sensing Imagery Segmentation
Center for Digital Systems, IMT Nord Europe, Institut Mines-Télécom, University of Lille（IMT Nord Europe数字系统中心，IMT北欧洲学院，巴黎高科矿业电信学院，里尔大学）；Sorbone University（索邦大学）；National Center for Remote Sensing - CNRS, Lebanon（黎巴嫩国家遥感中心）
Detecting and segmenting object instances is a common task in biomedical applications. Examples range from detecting lesions on functional magnetic resonance images, to the detection of tumours in histopathological images and extracting quantitative single-cell information from microscopy imagery, where cell segmentation is a major bottleneck. Attention-based transformers are state-of-the-art in a range of deep learning fields. They have recently been proposed for segmentation tasks where they are beginning to outperforming other methods. We present a novel attention-based cell detection trans…
Institute of Neuroinformatics（神经信息学研究所）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
We present a method for segmenting neuron membranes in 2D electron microscopy imagery. This segmentation task has been a bottleneck to reconstruction efforts of the brain's synaptic circuits. One common problem is the misclassification of blurry membrane fragments as cell interior, which leads to merging of two adjacent neuron sections into one via the blurry membrane region. Human annotators can easily avoid such errors by implicitly performing gap completion, taking into account the continuity of membranes. Drawing inspiration from these human strategies, we formulate the segmentation task a…
FSSUWNet: Mitigating the Fragility of Pre-trained Models with Feature Enhancement for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation in Underwater Images
School of Ocean Engineering and Technology, Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学海洋工程学院）；Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory（广东海洋科学与工程实验室）
National Institute of Research and Training in Telecommunications (INICTEL-UNI)（国家电信研究与培训学院（INICTEL-UNI））；National University of Engineering（国立工程大学）
Segmenting clouds in high-resolution satellite images is an arduous and challenging task due to the many types of geographies and clouds a satellite can capture. Therefore, it needs to be automated and optimized, specially for those who regularly process great amounts of satellite images, such as governmental institutions. In that sense, the contribution of this work is twofold: We present the CloudPeru2 dataset, consisting of 22,400 images of 512x512 pixels and their respective hand-drawn cloud masks, as well as the proposal of an end-to-end segmentation method for clouds using a Convolutiona…
Multiple Object Detection and Tracking in Panoramic Videos for Cycling Safety Analysis
Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geomatic Engineering（土木、环境与测绘工程系）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；SpaceTimeLab（时空实验室）；Department of Earth Science and Engineering（地球科学与工程系）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Centre for Transport Studies（交通研究中心）
DeepMerge: Deep-Learning-Based Region-Merging for Image Segmentation
Northeastern University at Qinhuangdao（东北大学秦皇岛分校）；University of Twente（特文特大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；University of Arkansas（阿肯色大学）；China University of Geosciences (Beijing)（中国地质大学（北京））
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
Infrared small target detection (ISTD) has a wide range of applications in early warning, rescue, and guidance. However, CNN based deep learning methods are not effective at segmenting infrared small target (IRST) that it lack of clear contour and texture features, and transformer based methods also struggle to achieve significant results due to the absence of convolution induction bias. To address these issues, we propose a new model called attention with bilinear correlation (ABC), which is based on the transformer architecture and includes a convolution linear fusion transformer (CLFT) modu…
Clouds are a very important factor in the availability of optical remote sensing images. Recently, deep learning-based cloud detection methods have surpassed classical methods based on rules and physical models of clouds. However, most of these deep models are very large which limits their applicability and explainability, while other models do not make use of the full spectral information in multi-spectral images such as Sentinel-2. In this paper, we propose a lightweight network for cloud detection, fusing multi-scale spectral and spatial features (CDFM3SF) and tailored for processing all sp…
Enhancing Ship Classification in Optical Satellite Imagery: Integrating Convolutional Block Attention Module with ResNet for Improved Performance
Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine（成均馆大学医学院）；The Coala Inc.（考拉公司）；Korea Science Academy of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院韩国科学学院）；Seoul National University School of Earth and Environmental Sciences（首尔国立大学地球与环境科学学院）
The recent thrust on digital agriculture (DA) has renewed significant research interest in the automated delineation of agricultural fields. Most prior work addressing this problem have focused on detecting medium to large fields, while there is strong evidence that around 40\% of the fields world-wide and 70% of the fields in Asia and Africa are small. The lack of adequate labeled images for small fields, huge variations in their color, texture, and shape, and faint boundary lines separating them make it difficult to develop an end-to-end learning model for detecting such fields. Hence, in th…
Building footprint extraction from high-resolution aerial images is always an essential part of urban dynamic monitoring, planning and management. It has also been a challenging task in remote sensing research. In recent years, deep neural networks have made great achievement in improving accuracy of building extraction from remote sensing imagery. However, most of existing approaches usually require large amount of parameters and floating point operations for high accuracy, it leads to high memory consumption and low inference speed which are harmful to research. In this paper, we proposed a …
NeuroVascU-Net: A Unified Multi-Scale and Cross-Domain Adaptive Feature Fusion U-Net for Precise 3D Segmentation of Brain Vessels in Contrast-Enhanced T1 MRI
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran（电信工程学院，工程学院，德黑兰大学）；Department of EECS, Lassonde School of Engineering, York University（电子工程系，拉索nde工程学院，约克大学）；Department of Neurosurgery, School of Medicine, Iran University of Medical Sciences（神经外科系，医学院，伊朗医学科学大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo（电子工程系，滑铁库大学）
Anomaly Segmentation for High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images Based on Pixel Descriptors
State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University（武汉大学测绘遥感信息工程国家重点实验室）；School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University（武汉大学遥感信息工程学院）
Geospatial-Temporal Sensemaking of Remote Sensing Activity Detections with Multimodal Large Language Model
SenSIP Center, School of ECEE, Arizona State University（SenSIP中心，电子与计算机工程学院，亚利桑那州立大学）；Prime Solutions Group Inc（Prime Solutions Group公司）；Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity（智能高级研究计划局）
