Application of a semantic segmentation convolutional neural network for accurate automatic detection and mapping of solar photovoltaic arrays in aerial imagery
Duke University（杜克大学）
Joseph Camilo, Rui Wang, Leslie M. Collins, Kyle Bradbury, Jordan M. Malof
备注：
Accepted for publication at the 2017 IEEE Applied Imagery Pattern Recognition (AIPR) Workshop. Presented at the conference in Washington D.C., October 10-12
We consider the problem of automatically detecting small-scale solar photovoltaic arrays for behind-the-meter energy resource assessment in high resolution aerial imagery. Such algorithms offer a faster and more cost-effective solution to collecting information on distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays, such as their location, capacity, and generated energy. The surface area of PV arrays, a characteristic which can be estimated from aerial imagery, provides an important proxy for array capacity and energy generation. In this work, we employ a state-of-the-art convolutional neural network architecture, called SegNet (Badrinarayanan et. al., 2015), to semantically segment (or map) PV arrays in aerial imagery. This builds on previous work focused on identifying the locations of PV arrays, as opposed to their specific shapes and sizes. We measure the ability of our SegNet implementation to estimate the surface area of PV arrays on a large, publicly available, dataset that has been employed in several previous studies. The results indicate that the SegNet model yields substantial performance improvements with respect to estimating shape and size as compared to a recently proposed convolutional neural network PV detection algorithm.
KeyW Corp.（KeyW公司）；Sensors Directorate, Air Force Research Lab（空军研究实验室传感器处）
In recent years, several real-time or near real-time object detectors have been developed. However these object detectors are typically designed for first-person view images where the subject is large in the image and do not directly apply well to detecting vehicles in aerial imagery. Though some detectors have been developed for aerial imagery, these are either slow or do not handle multi-scale imagery very well. Here the popular YOLOv2 detector is modified to vastly improve it's performance on aerial data. The modified detector is compared to Faster RCNN on several aerial imagery datasets. T…
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；University of South Australia（南澳大学）
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become essential for processing the vast amounts of aerial imagery collected using earth-observing satellite platforms. However, DNNs are vulnerable towards adversarial examples, and it is expected that this weakness also plagues DNNs for aerial imagery. In this work, we demonstrate one of the first efforts on physical adversarial attacks on aerial imagery, whereby adversarial patches were optimised, fabricated and installed on or near target objects (cars) to significantly reduce the efficacy of an object detector applied on overhead images. Physical adversari…
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…
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Object detection in natural images has achieved remarkable results over the years. However, a similar progress has not yet been observed in aerial object detection due to several challenges, such as high resolution images, instances scale variation, class imbalance etc. We show the performance of two-stage, one-stage and attention based object detectors on the iSAID dataset. Furthermore, we describe some modifications and analysis performed for different models - a) In two stage detector: introduced weighted attention based FPN, class balanced sampler and density prediction head. b) In one sta…
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…
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…
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心（DLR））；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Multi-class vehicle detection from airborne imagery with orientation estimation is an important task in the near and remote vision domains with applications in traffic monitoring and disaster management. In the last decade, we have witnessed significant progress in object detection in ground imagery, but it is still in its infancy in airborne imagery, mostly due to the scarcity of diverse and large-scale datasets. Despite being a useful tool for different applications, current airborne datasets only partially reflect the challenges of real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we introduce E…
Detection of pedestrians in aerial imagery captured by drones has many applications including intersection monitoring, patrolling, and surveillance, to name a few. However, the problem is involved due to continuouslychanging camera viewpoint and object appearance as well as the need for lightweight algorithms to run on on-board embedded systems. To address this issue, the paper proposes a framework for pedestrian detection in videos based on the YOLO object detection network [6] while having a high throughput of more than 5 FPS on the Jetson TX2 embedded board. The framework exploits deep lear…
Linux Polska（波兰Linux公司）；University of Warsaw（华沙大学）；Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture（农业结构调整与现代化署）
Monitoring of land cover and land use is crucial in natural resources management. Automatic visual mapping can carry enormous economic value for agriculture, forestry, or public administration. Satellite or aerial images combined with computer vision and deep learning enable precise assessment and can significantly speed up change detection. Aerial imagery usually provides images with much higher pixel resolution than satellite data allowing more detailed mapping. However, there is still a lack of aerial datasets made for the segmentation, covering rural areas with a resolution of tens centime…
Monitoring of colonial waterbird nesting islands is essential to tracking waterbird population trends, which are used for evaluating ecosystem health and informing conservation management decisions. Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, have emerged as a viable technology to precisely monitor waterbird colonies. However, manually counting waterbirds from hundreds, or potentially thousands, of aerial images is both difficult and time-consuming. In this work, we present a deep learning pipeline that can be used to precisely detect, count, and monitor waterbirds using aerial imagery coll…
Leibniz Universität Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）；Technische Universität Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；University of Twente（特温特大学）
State-of-the-art object detection approaches such as Fast/Faster R-CNN, SSD, or YOLO have difficulties detecting dense, small targets with arbitrary orientation in large aerial images. The main reason is that using interpolation to align RoI features can result in a lack of accuracy or even loss of location information. We present the Local-aware Region Convolutional Neural Network (LR-CNN), a novel two-stage approach for vehicle detection in aerial imagery. We enhance translation invariance to detect dense vehicles and address the boundary quantization issue amongst dense vehicles by aggregat…
Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt（英戈尔施塔特工业大学）；University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
The availability of real-world data is a key element for novel developments in the fields of automotive and traffic research. Aerial imagery has the major advantage of recording multiple objects simultaneously and overcomes limitations such as occlusions. However, there are only few data sets available. This work describes a process to estimate a precise vehicle position from aerial imagery. A robust object detection is crucial for reliable results, hence the state-of-the-art deep neural network Mask-RCNN is applied for that purpose. Two training data sets are employed: The first one is optimi…
Detection and classification of objects in aerial imagery have several applications like urban planning, crop surveillance, and traffic surveillance. However, due to the lower resolution of the objects and the effect of noise in aerial images, extracting distinguishing features for the objects is a challenge. We evaluate CenterNet, a state of the art method for real-time 2D object detection, on the VisDrone2019 dataset. We evaluate the performance of the model with different backbone networks in conjunction with varying resolutions during training and testing.
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…
University of Maryland Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩县分校）；Texas A&M University（得克萨斯农工大学）
Visual scene understanding is the core task in making any crucial decision in any computer vision system. Although popular computer vision datasets like Cityscapes, MS-COCO, PASCAL provide good benchmarks for several tasks (e.g. image classification, segmentation, object detection), these datasets are hardly suitable for post disaster damage assessments. On the other hand, existing natural disaster datasets include mainly satellite imagery which have low spatial resolution and a high revisit period. Therefore, they do not have a scope to provide quick and efficient damage assessment tasks. Unm…
For object detection in wide-area aerial imagery, post-processing is usually needed to reduce false detections. We propose a two-stage post-processing scheme which comprises an area-thresholding sieving process and a morphological closing operation. We use two wide-area aerial videos to compare the performance of five object detection algorithms in the absence and in the presence of our post-processing scheme. The automatic detection results are compared with the ground-truth objects. Several metrics are used for performance comparison.
AIFloodSense: A Global Aerial Imagery Dataset for Semantic Segmentation and Understanding of Flooded Environments
Department of Management Science and Technology（管理科学与技术系）；Hellenic Mediterranean University（希伯伦地中海大学）；Institute of Computer Science, FORTH（信息科学研究所，FORTH）
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…
Change detection for aerial imagery involves locating and identifying changes associated with the areas of interest between co-registered bi-temporal or multi-temporal images of a geographical location. Farm ponds are man-made structures belonging to the category of minor irrigation structures used to collect surface run-off water for future irrigation purposes. Detection of farm ponds from aerial imagery and their evolution over time helps in land surveying to analyze the agricultural shifts, policy implementation, seasonal effects and climate changes. In this paper, we introduce a publicly a…
A robust and fast automatic moving object detection and tracking system is essential to characterize target object and extract spatial and temporal information for different functionalities including video surveillance systems, urban traffic monitoring and navigation, robotic. In this dissertation, I present a collaborative Spatial Pyramid Context-aware moving object detection and Tracking system. The proposed visual tracker is composed of one master tracker that usually relies on visual object features and two auxiliary trackers based on object temporal motion information that will be called …
As a specific semantic segmentation task, aerial imagery segmentation has been widely employed in high spatial resolution (HSR) remote sensing images understanding. Besides common issues (e.g. large scale variation) faced by general semantic segmentation tasks, aerial imagery segmentation has some unique challenges, the most critical one among which lies in foreground-background imbalance. There have been some recent efforts that attempt to address this issue by proposing sophisticated neural network architectures, since they can be used to extract informative multi-scale feature representatio…
Cross-Modal Urban Sensing: Evaluating Sound-Vision Alignment Across Street-Level and Aerial Imagery
Department of Geography, University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学地理系）；Department of Environmental Sciences, Emory University（埃默里大学环境科学系）；University of Canterbury（坎特伯雷大学）；School of Resource and Environmental Sciences, Wuhan University（武汉大学资源与环境科学学院）
Automatic building extraction from aerial imagery has several applications in urban planning, disaster management, and change detection. In recent years, several works have adopted deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for building extraction, since they produce rich features that are invariant against lighting conditions, shadows, etc. Although several advances have been made, building extraction from aerial imagery still presents multiple challenges. Most of the deep learning segmentation methods optimize the per-pixel loss with respect to the ground truth without knowledge of the contex…
Zero-shot Shark Tracking and Biometrics from Aerial Imagery
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Flinders University（弗林德斯大学）；Centro de Investigación en Ciencias del Mar y Limnología, Universidad de Costa Rica（哥斯达黎加大学海洋与湖沼科学研究中心）
High-Frequency Semantics and Geometric Priors for End-to-End Detection Transformers in Challenging UAV Imagery
College of Mathematics and Informatics（数学与信息学院）；South China Agricultural University（华南农业大学）；Key Laboratory of Smart Agricultural Technology in Tropical South China, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs（热带南中国智能农业技术重点实验室，农业农村部）；School of Economics and Trade（经济贸易学院）
Deep Learning-Based Object Detection in Maritime Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Imagery: Review and Experimental Comparisons
Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）；Chongqing Research Institute, Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学重庆研究院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
University of Lincoln（林肯大学）；Flanders Make（法兰德斯制造研究院）；Ghent University（根特大学）；Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (ILVO)（法兰德斯农业、渔业与食品研究所）；Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences（瑞典农业科学大学）
Weed and crop segmentation is becoming an increasingly integral part of precision farming that leverages the current computer vision and deep learning technologies. Research has been extensively carried out based on images captured with a camera from various platforms. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and ground-based vehicles including agricultural robots are the two popular platforms for data collection in fields. They all contribute to site-specific weed management (SSWM) to maintain crop yield. Currently, the data from these two platforms is processed separately, though sharing the same sem…
This report presents the application of object detection on a database of underwater images of different species of crabs, as well as aerial images of sea lions and finally the Pascal VOC dataset. The model is an end-to-end object detection neural network based on a convolutional network base and a Long Short-Term Memory detector.
LAF-YOLOv10 with Partial Convolution Backbone, Attention-Guided Feature Pyramid, Auxiliary P2 Head, and Wise-IoU Loss for Small Object Detection in Drone Aerial Imagery
Department of Information Technology（信息科技系）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程系）
Early, precise detection of nutrient deficiency stress (NDS) has key economic as well as environmental impact; precision application of chemicals in place of blanket application reduces operational costs for the growers while reducing the amount of chemicals which may enter the environment unnecessarily. Furthermore, earlier treatment reduces the amount of loss and therefore boosts crop production during a given season. With this in mind, we collect sequences of high-resolution aerial imagery and construct semantic segmentation models to detect and predict NDS across the field. Our work sits a…
University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Intelinair Inc.（Intelinair公司）；University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Advances in remote sensing technology have led to the capture of massive amounts of data. Increased image resolution, more frequent revisit times, and additional spectral channels have created an explosion in the amount of data that is available to provide analyses and intelligence across domains, including agriculture. However, the processing of this data comes with a cost in terms of computation time and money, both of which must be considered when the goal of an algorithm is to provide real-time intelligence to improve efficiencies. Specifically, we seek to identify nutrient deficient areas…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）
In this paper, we demonstrate the ability to discriminate between cultivated maize plant and grass or grass-like weed image segments using the context surrounding the image segments. While convolutional neural networks have brought state of the art accuracies within object detection, errors arise when objects in different classes share similar features. This scenario often occurs when objects in images are viewed at too small of a scale to discern distinct differences in features, causing images to be incorrectly classified or localized. To solve this problem, we will explore using context whe…
Evaluation of Deep Learning Semantic Segmentation for Land Cover Mapping on Multispectral, Hyperspectral and High Spatial Aerial Imagery
Center for Space and Remote Sensing Research, National Central University（国立中央大学太空及遥测研究中心）；Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University（国立中央大学资讯工程学系）
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Multi-pedestrian tracking in aerial imagery has several applications such as large-scale event monitoring, disaster management, search-and-rescue missions, and as input into predictive crowd dynamic models. Due to the challenges such as the large number and the tiny size of the pedestrians (e.g., 4 x 4 pixels) with their similar appearances as well as different scales and atmospheric conditions of the images with their extremely low frame rates (e.g., 2 fps), current state-of-the-art algorithms including the deep learning-based ones are unable to perform well. In this paper, we propose AerialM…
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…
Advances in machine learning and deep neural networks for object detection, coupled with lower cost and power requirements of cameras, led to promising vision-based solutions for sUAS detection. However, solely relying on the visible spectrum has previously led to reliability issues in low contrast scenarios such as sUAS flying below the treeline and against bright sources of light. Alternatively, due to the relatively high heat signatures emitted from sUAS during flight, a long-wave infrared (LWIR) sensor is able to produce images that clearly contrast the sUAS from its background. However, c…
The quantity of small scale solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays in the United States has grown rapidly in recent years. As a result, there is substantial interest in high quality information about the quantity, power capacity, and energy generated by such arrays, including at a high spatial resolution (e.g., counties, cities, or even smaller regions). Unfortunately, existing methods for obtaining this information, such as surveys and utility interconnection filings, are limited in their completeness and spatial resolution. This work presents a computer algorithm that automatically detects PV panels…
