Most current semantic segmentation approaches fall back on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, their use of convolution operations with local receptive fields causes failures in modeling contextual spatial relations. Prior works have sought to address this issue by using graphical models or spatial propagation modules in networks. But such models often fail to capture long-range spatial relationships between entities, which leads to spatially fragmented predictions. Moreover, recent works have demonstrated that channel-wise information also acts a pivotal part in CNNs. In this work, we introduce two simple yet effective network units, the spatial relation module and the channel relation module, to learn and reason about global relationships between any two spatial positions or feature maps, and then produce relation-augmented feature representations. The spatial and channel relation modules are general and extensible, and can be used in a plug-and-play fashion with the existing fully convolutional network (FCN) framework. We evaluate relation module-equipped networks on semantic segmentation tasks using two aerial image datasets, which fundamentally depend on long-range spatial relational reasoning. The networks achieve very competitive results, bringing significant improvements over baselines.
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…
Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica（中央研究院资讯科学研究所）；MOST Joint Research Center for AI Technology and All Vista Healthcare（科技部AI技术与全视医疗照护联合研究中心）；National Sun Yat-sen University（国立中山大学）
In this paper, we present an object detection method that tackles the stingray detection problem based on aerial images. In this problem, the images are aerially captured on a sea-surface area by using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), and the stingrays swimming under (but close to) the sea surface are the target we want to detect and locate. To this end, we use a deep object detection method, faster RCNN, to train a stingray detector based on a limited training set of images. To boost the performance, we develop a new generative approach, conditional GLO, to increase the training samples of s…
State Key Laboratory of Optical Instrumentation, Zhejiang University, China（浙江大学光学仪器国家重点实验室）；Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院人机与机器人研究所）
Aerial pixel-wise scene perception of the surrounding environment is an important task for UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). Previous research works mainly adopt conventional pinhole cameras or fisheye cameras as the imaging device. However, these imaging systems cannot achieve large Field of View (FoV), small size, and lightweight at the same time. To this end, we design a UAV system with a Panoramic Annular Lens (PAL), which has the characteristics of small size, low weight, and a 360-degree annular FoV. A lightweight panoramic annular semantic segmentation neural network model is designed to…
University Politehnica of Bucharest（布加勒斯特理工大学）；Autonomous Systems（自治系统）
Semantic segmentation and vision-based geolocalization in aerial images are challenging tasks in computer vision. Due to the advent of deep convolutional nets and the availability of relatively low cost UAVs, they are currently generating a growing attention in the field. We propose a novel multi-task multi-stage neural network that is able to handle the two problems at the same time, in a single forward pass. The first stage of our network predicts pixelwise class labels, while the second stage provides a precise location using two branches. One branch uses a regression network, while the oth…
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…
Object detection is a basic and important task in the field of aerial image processing and has gained much attention in computer vision. However, previous aerial image object detection approaches have insufficient use of scene semantic information between different regions of large-scale aerial images. In addition, complex background and scale changes make it difficult to improve detection accuracy. To address these issues, we propose a relationship representation network for object detection in aerial images (RelationRS): 1) Firstly, multi-scale features are fused and enhanced by a dual relat…
Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学）；LINKS Foundation（LINKS基金会）；Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale per l’Informatica（全国大学信息学联盟）
In this paper, we investigate the problem of Semantic Segmentation for agricultural aerial imagery. We observe that the existing methods used for this task are designed without considering two characteristics of the aerial data: (i) the top-down perspective implies that the model cannot rely on a fixed semantic structure of the scene, because the same scene may be experienced with different rotations of the sensor; (ii) there can be a strong imbalance in the distribution of semantic classes because the relevant objects of the scene may appear at extremely different scales (e.g., a field of cro…
HMR-Net: Hierarchical Modular Routing for Cross-Domain Object Detection in Aerial Images
Department of Computer Science, University of York（约克大学计算机科学系）；SEIEE, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学SEIEE）；Computer Vision Laboratory, Linkoping University（林哈姆大学计算机视觉实验室）；School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, University of Leicester（莱斯特大学计算与数学科学学院）；SCEE, East China Normal University（华东师范大学SCEE）
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心（DLR））；University of Venice（威尼斯大学）
Object detection is an important and challenging problem in computer vision. Although the past decade has witnessed major advances in object detection in natural scenes, such successes have been slow to aerial imagery, not only because of the huge variation in the scale, orientation and shape of the object instances on the earth's surface, but also due to the scarcity of well-annotated datasets of objects in aerial scenes. To advance object detection research in Earth Vision, also known as Earth Observation and Remote Sensing, we introduce a large-scale Dataset for Object deTection in Aerial i…
University of Missouri（密苏里大学）；University of Technology（理工大学）；U.S. Naval Research Laboratory（美国海军研究实验室）
Detection of moving objects such as vehicles in videos acquired from an airborne camera is very useful for video analytics applications. Using fast low power algorithms for onboard moving object detection would also provide region of interest-based semantic information for scene content aware image compression. This would enable more efficient and flexible communication link utilization in lowbandwidth airborne cloud computing networks. Despite recent advances in both UAV or drone platforms and imaging sensor technologies, vehicle detection from aerial video remains challenging due to small ob…
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…
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…
Computer Vision Lab, TU Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学计算机视觉实验室）；Autonomous Vision Group, MPI for Intelligent Systems Tübingen（蒂宾根马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所自主视觉研究组）；Computer Vision and Geometry Group, ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院计算机视觉与几何研究组）
The success of deep learning in computer vision is based on availability of large annotated datasets. To lower the need for hand labeled images, virtually rendered 3D worlds have recently gained popularity. Creating realistic 3D content is challenging on its own and requires significant human effort. In this work, we propose an alternative paradigm which combines real and synthetic data for learning semantic instance segmentation and object detection models. Exploiting the fact that not all aspects of the scene are equally important for this task, we propose to augment real-world imagery with …
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；Remote Sensing Laboratory（遥感实验室）
Autonomously searching for hazardous radiation sources requires the ability of the aerial and ground systems to understand the scene they are scouting. In this paper, we present systems, algorithms, and experiments to perform radiation search using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) by employing semantic scene segmentation. The aerial data is used to identify radiological points of interest, generate an orthophoto along with a digital elevation model (DEM) of the scene, and perform semantic segmentation to assign a category (e.g. road, grass) to each pixel in the…
University of Twente（特文特大学）；Leibniz University Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）
The detection of vehicles in aerial images is widely applied in many applications. Comparing with object detection in the ground view images, vehicle detection in aerial images remains a challenging problem because of small vehicle size, monotone appearance and the complex background. In this paper, we propose a novel double focal loss convolutional neural network framework (DFL-CNN). In the proposed framework, the skip connection is used in the CNN structure to enhance the feature learning. Also, the focal loss function is used to substitute for conventional cross entropy loss function in bot…
Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence, UAE（阿联酋Inception人工智能研究所）；Wuhan University, China（中国武汉大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China（中国华中科技大学）
Existing Earth Vision datasets are either suitable for semantic segmentation or object detection. In this work, we introduce the first benchmark dataset for instance segmentation in aerial imagery that combines instance-level object detection and pixel-level segmentation tasks. In comparison to instance segmentation in natural scenes, aerial images present unique challenges e.g., a huge number of instances per image, large object-scale variations and abundant tiny objects. Our large-scale and densely annotated Instance Segmentation in Aerial Images Dataset (iSAID) comes with 655,451 object ins…
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Aerial scene classification, which aims to automatically label an aerial image with a specific semantic category, is a fundamental problem for understanding high-resolution remote sensing imagery. In recent years, it has become an active task in remote sensing area and numerous algorithms have been proposed for this task, including many machine learning and data-driven approaches. However, the existing datasets for aerial scene classification like UC-Merced dataset and WHU-RS19 are with relatively small sizes, and the results on them are already saturated. This largely limits the development o…
Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）；ON Semiconductor（安森美半导体）
We investigate applying convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture to facilitate aerial hyperspectral scene understanding and present a new hyperspectral dataset-AeroRIT-that is large enough for CNN training. To date the majority of hyperspectral airborne have been confined to various sub-categories of vegetation and roads and this scene introduces two new categories: buildings and cars. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive large-scale hyperspectral scene with nearly seven million pixel annotations for identifying cars, roads, and buildings. We compare the perform…
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）；Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of British Columbia (UBC)（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）
Aerial scene recognition is a fundamental visual task and has attracted an increasing research interest in the last few years. Most of current researches mainly deploy efforts to categorize an aerial image into one scene-level label, while in real-world scenarios, there often exist multiple scenes in a single image. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to take a step forward to a more practical and challenging task, namely multi-scene recognition in single images. Moreover, we note that manually yielding annotations for such a task is extraordinarily time- and labor-consuming. To address this,…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with multiple complementary sensors have tremendous potential for fast autonomous or remote-controlled semantic scene analysis, e.g., for disaster examination. In this work, we propose a UAV system for real-time semantic inference and fusion of multiple sensor modalities. Semantic segmentation of LiDAR scans and RGB images, as well as object detection on RGB and thermal images, run online onboard the UAV computer using lightweight CNN architectures and embedded inference accelerators. We follow a late fusion approach where semantic information from mult…
State Key Lab. LIESMARS, Wuhan University（武汉大学测绘遥感信息工程国家重点实验室）；School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学自动化学院）
Given an aerial image, aerial scene parsing (ASP) targets to interpret the semantic structure of the image content, e.g., by assigning a semantic label to every pixel of the image. With the popularization of data-driven methods, the past decades have witnessed promising progress on ASP by approaching the problem with the schemes of tile-level scene classification or segmentation-based image analysis, when using high-resolution aerial images. However, the former scheme often produces results with tile-wise boundaries, while the latter one needs to handle the complex modeling process from pixels…
Aerial scenes are more complicated in terms of object distribution and spatial arrangement than natural scenes due to the bird view, and thus remain challenging to learn discriminative scene representation. Recent solutions design \textit{local semantic descriptors} so that region of interests (RoIs) can be properly highlighted. However, each local descriptor has limited description capability and the overall scene representation remains to be refined. In this paper, we solve this problem by designing a novel representation set named \textit{instance representation bank} (IRB), which unifies m…
Malaviya National Institute of Technology Jaipur（斋浦尔马拉维亚国家理工学院）
Detection of small-sized targets is of paramount importance in many aerial vision-based applications. The commonly deployed low cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for aerial scene analysis are highly resource constrained in nature. In this paper we propose a simple short and shallow network (SSSDet) to robustly detect and classify small-sized vehicles in aerial scenes. The proposed SSSDet is up to 4x faster, requires 4.4x less FLOPs, has 30x less parameters, requires 31x less memory space and provides better accuracy in comparison to existing state-of-the-art detectors. Thus, it is more suit…
School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University（武汉大学遥感信息工程学院）；Faculty of Information Engineering, China University of Geosciences（中国地质大学（武汉）信息工程学院）
With the development of deep learning, many state-of-the-art natural image scene classification methods have demonstrated impressive performance. While the current convolution neural network tends to extract global features and global semantic information in a scene, the geo-spatial objects can be located at anywhere in an aerial image scene and their spatial arrangement tends to be more complicated. One possible solution is to preserve more local semantic information and enhance feature propagation. In this paper, an end to end multiple instance dense connected convolution neural network (MID…
Horizon-GS: Unified 3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-Scale Aerial-to-Ground Scenes
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Brown University（布朗大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
German Aerospace Center（德国航空航天中心）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Aerial scene recognition is a fundamental research problem in interpreting high-resolution aerial imagery. Over the past few years, most studies focus on classifying an image into one scene category, while in real-world scenarios, it is more often that a single image contains multiple scenes. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate a more practical yet underexplored task -- multi-scene recognition in single images. To this end, we create a large-scale dataset, called MultiScene, composed of 100,000 unconstrained high-resolution aerial images. Considering that manually labeling such images is …
Automatic building extraction from aerial and satellite imagery is highly challenging due to extremely large variations of building appearances. To attack this problem, we design a convolutional network with a final stage that integrates activations from multiple preceding stages for pixel-wise prediction, and introduce the signed distance function of building boundaries as the output representation, which has an enhanced representation power. We leverage abundant building footprint data available from geographic information systems (GIS) to compile training data. The trained network achieves …
THYME: Temporal Hierarchical-Cyclic Interactivity Modeling for Video Scene Graphs in Aerial Footage
University of Arkansas（亚拉巴马大学）；University of Science, VNU-HCM（科学大学，VNU-HCM）；Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh（越南国家大学，胡志明市）；Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
Aerial scene classification remains challenging as: 1) the size of key objects in determining the scene scheme varies greatly; 2) many objects irrelevant to the scene scheme are often flooded in the image. Hence, how to effectively perceive the region of interests (RoIs) from a variety of sizes and build more discriminative representation from such complicated object distribution is vital to understand an aerial scene. In this paper, we propose a novel all grains, one scheme (AGOS) framework to tackle these challenges. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work to extend the classic mu…
Unmanned Aerial vehicles (UAV) are a promising technology for smart farming related applications. Aerial monitoring of agriculture farms with UAV enables key decision-making pertaining to crop monitoring. Advancements in deep learning techniques have further enhanced the precision and reliability of aerial imagery based analysis. The capabilities to mount various kinds of sensors (RGB, spectral cameras) on UAV allows remote crop analysis applications such as vegetation classification and segmentation, crop counting, yield monitoring and prediction, crop mapping, weed detection, disease and nut…
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）；Fraunhofer IOSB（弗劳恩霍夫应用光学与系统研究所）
Understanding the complex urban infrastructure with centimeter-level accuracy is essential for many applications from autonomous driving to mapping, infrastructure monitoring, and urban management. Aerial images provide valuable information over a large area instantaneously; nevertheless, no current dataset captures the complexity of aerial scenes at the level of granularity required by real-world applications. To address this, we introduce SkyScapes, an aerial image dataset with highly-accurate, fine-grained annotations for pixel-level semantic labeling. SkyScapes provides annotations for 31 …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Ping An Technology Co., Ltd（平安科技有限公司）；Hefei ZhanDa Intelligence Technology Co., Ltd（合肥展大智能科技有限公司）
Multi-modal aerial view object classification (MAVOC) in Automatic target recognition (ATR), although an important and challenging problem, has been under studied. This paper firstly finds that fine-grained data, class imbalance and various shooting conditions preclude the representational ability of general image classification. Moreover, the MAVOC dataset has scene aggregation characteristics. By exploiting these properties, we propose Scene Clustering Based Pseudo-labeling Strategy (SCP-Label), a simple yet effective method to employ in post-processing. The SCP-Label brings greater accuracy…
Scene classification is a fundamental task in interpretation of remote sensing images, and has become an active research topic in remote sensing community due to its important role in a wide range of applications. Over the past years, tremendous efforts have been made for developing powerful approaches for scene classification of remote sensing images, evolving from the traditional bag-of-visual-words model to the new generation deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The deep CNN based methods have exhibited remarkable breakthrough on performance, dramatically outperforming previous method…
TAFormer: A Unified Target-Aware Transformer for Video and Motion Joint Prediction in Aerial Scenes
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）
Baidu Research（百度研究院）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；German Aerospace Center（德国航空航天中心）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）
Aerial scene recognition is a fundamental task in remote sensing and has recently received increased interest. While the visual information from overhead images with powerful models and efficient algorithms yields considerable performance on scene recognition, it still suffers from the variation of ground objects, lighting conditions etc. Inspired by the multi-channel perception theory in cognition science, in this paper, for improving the performance on the aerial scene recognition, we explore a novel audiovisual aerial scene recognition task using both images and sounds as input. Based on an…
Drones equipped with cameras are emerging as a powerful tool for large-scale aerial 3D scanning, but existing automatic flight planners do not exploit all available information about the scene, and can therefore produce inaccurate and incomplete 3D models. We present an automatic method to generate drone trajectories, such that the imagery acquired during the flight will later produce a high-fidelity 3D model. Our method uses a coarse estimate of the scene geometry to plan camera trajectories that: (1) cover the scene as thoroughly as possible; (2) encourage observations of scene geometry from…
Aerial-Ground Image Feature Matching via 3D Gaussian Splatting-based Intermediate View Rendering
organization= School of Computer Science , addressline= China University of Geosciences , city= Wuhan , postcode= 430074 , country= China；organization= Guangdong Key Laboratory of Urban Informatics , addressline= Shenzhen University , city= Guangdong Shenzhen , postcode= 518060 , country= China；organization= MNR Key Laboratory for Geo-Environmental Monitoring of Great Bay Area , addressline= Shenzhen University , city= Guangdong Shenzhen , postcode= 518060 , country= China；organization= Engineering Research Center of Natural Resource Information Management
Drones shooting can be applied in dynamic traffic monitoring, object detecting and tracking, and other vision tasks. The variability of the shooting location adds some intractable challenges to these missions, such as varying scale, unstable exposure, and scene migration. In this paper, we strive to tackle the above challenges and automatically understand the crowd from the visual data collected from drones. First, to alleviate the background noise generated in cross-scene testing, a double-stream crowd counting model is proposed, which extracts optical flow and frame difference information as…
