Classification of Large-Scale High-Resolution SAR Images with Deep Transfer Learning
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）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）
Zhongling Huang, Corneliu Octavian Dumitru, Zongxu Pan, Bin Lei, Mihai Datcu
The classification of large-scale high-resolution SAR land cover images acquired by satellites is a challenging task, facing several difficulties such as semantic annotation with expertise, changing data characteristics due to varying imaging parameters or regional target area differences, and complex scattering mechanisms being different from optical imaging. Given a large-scale SAR land cover dataset collected from TerraSAR-X images with a hierarchical three-level annotation of 150 categories and comprising more than 100,000 patches, three main challenges in automatically interpreting SAR images of highly imbalanced classes, geographic diversity, and label noise are addressed. In this letter, a deep transfer learning method is proposed based on a similarly annotated optical land cover dataset (NWPU-RESISC45). Besides, a top-2 smooth loss function with cost-sensitive parameters was introduced to tackle the label noise and imbalanced classes' problems. The proposed method shows high efficiency in transferring information from a similarly annotated remote sensing dataset, a robust performance on highly imbalanced classes, and is alleviating the over-fitting problem caused by label noise. What's more, the learned deep model has a good generalization for other SAR-specific tasks, such as MSTAR target recognition with a state-of-the-art classification accuracy of 99.46%.
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院电子学研究所）
Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have attracted much attention in remote sensing recently. Compared with the large-scale annotated dataset in natural images, the lack of labeled data in remote sensing becomes an obstacle to train a deep network very well, especially in SAR image interpretation. Transfer learning provides an effective way to solve this problem by borrowing the knowledge from the source task to the target task. In optical remote sensing application, a prevalent mechanism is to fine-tune on an existing model pre-trained with a large-scale natural image dataset, such as …
Unlocking Optical Prior: Spectrum-Guided Knowledge Transfer for SAR Generalized Category Discovery
College of Electronic Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology（电子科学与技术学院，国防科技大学）；State Key Laboratory of Complex System Simulation and Modeling Technology（复杂系统仿真与建模技术国家重点实验室）
OpenEarthMap-SAR: A Benchmark Synthetic Aperture Radar Dataset for Global High-Resolution Land Cover Mapping
RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP), RIKEN（理化学研究所先进智能中心（AIP），理化学研究所）；Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo（东京大学前沿科学研究生院）
SARLO-80: Worldwide Slant SAR Language Optic Dataset 80cm
DEMR-ONERA – The French Aerospace Lab, Université Paris-Saclay（法国航空航天实验室DEMR-ONERA，巴黎-萨克雷大学）；DTIS-ONERA – The French Aerospace Lab, Université Paris-Saclay（法国航空航天实验室DTIS-ONERA，巴黎-萨克雷大学）；Hugging Face
Enhancing Scene Classification in Cloudy Image Scenarios: A Collaborative Transfer Method with Information Regulation Mechanism using Optical Cloud-Covered and SAR Remote Sensing Images
School of Geosciences and Info-Physics, Central South University（中南大学地球科学与信息物理学院）；Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente（特文特大学地球信息科学与地球观测学院）
Qian Xuesen Laboratory of Space Technology, China Academy of Space Technology（中国空间技术研究院钱学森空间技术实验室）
Deep learning techniques have made an increasing impact on the field of remote sensing. However, deep neural networks based fusion of multimodal data from different remote sensors with heterogenous characteristics has not been fully explored, due to the lack of availability of big amounts of perfectly aligned multi-sensor image data with diverse scenes of high resolutions, especially for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data and optical imagery. To promote the development of deep learning based SAR-optical fusion approaches, we release the QXS-SAROPT dataset, which contains 20,000 pairs of SAR-o…
NORCE, The Norwegian Research Centre AS（挪威研究中心NORCE）；UiT the Arctic University of Norway（挪威北极大学UiT）
In this paper, we explore the possibility of detecting polar lows in C-band SAR images by means of deep learning. Specifically, we introduce a novel dataset consisting of Sentinel-1 images divided into two classes, representing the presence and absence of a maritime mesocyclone, respectively. The dataset is constructed using the ERA5 dataset as baseline and it consists of 2004 annotated images. To our knowledge, this is the first dataset of its kind to be publicly released. The dataset is used to train a deep learning model to classify the labeled images. Evaluated on an independent test set, …
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Air Force Research Laboratory（美国空军研究实验室）
This paper proposes a spatio-temporal decomposition for the detection of moving targets in multiantenna SAR. As a high resolution radar imaging modality, SAR detects and localizes non-moving targets accurately, giving it an advantage over lower resolution GMTI radars. Moving target detection is more challenging due to target smearing and masking by clutter. Space-time adaptive processing (STAP) is often used to remove the stationary clutter and enhance the moving targets. In this work, it is shown that the performance of STAP can be improved by modeling the clutter covariance as a space vs. ti…
Qian Xuesen Laboratory of Space Technology, China Academy of Space Technology（中国空间技术研究院钱学森空间技术实验室）；School of Information and Electronics Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学信息与电子工程学院）；School of Mathematics and Computational Science, Xiangtan University（湘潭大学数学与计算科学学院）
Deep learning methods have made significant progress in ship detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The pretraining technique is usually adopted to support deep neural networks-based SAR ship detectors due to the scarce labeled SAR images. However, directly leveraging ImageNet pretraining is hardly to obtain a good ship detector because of different imaging perspective and geometry. In this paper, to resolve the problem of inconsistent imaging perspective between ImageNet and earth observations, we propose an optical ship detector (OSD) pretraining technique, which transfers the c…
SARLANG-1M: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Modeling in SAR Image Understanding
Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo（东京大学前沿科学研究生院）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP), RIKEN（理化学研究所先进智能研究中心）；School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学电子与信息工程学院）；The School of Electronic and Communication Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学电子与通信工程学院）
OceanSAR-2: A Universal Feature Extractor for SAR Ocean Observation
Galeio, Paris, France（法国加利欧）；LOPS, Ifremer, Plouzané, France（法国若特默尔实验室）；OceanScope, Brest, France（法国海洋观测中心）；Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China（中国信息科学技术大学）
In-Q-Tel - CosmiQ Works；Capella Space；Maxar Technologies（马克萨尔技术公司）；German Aerospace Center（德国航空航天中心）；Intel AI Lab（英特尔人工智能实验室）
Within the remote sensing domain, a diverse set of acquisition modalities exist, each with their own unique strengths and weaknesses. Yet, most of the current literature and open datasets only deal with electro-optical (optical) data for different detection and segmentation tasks at high spatial resolutions. optical data is often the preferred choice for geospatial applications, but requires clear skies and little cloud cover to work well. Conversely, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors have the unique capability to penetrate clouds and collect during all weather, day and night conditions. …
Millimeter-wave radars are being increasingly integrated into commercial vehicles to support advanced driver-assistance system features. A key shortcoming for present-day vehicular radar imaging is poor azimuth resolution (for side-looking operation) due to the form factor limits on antenna size and placement. In this paper, we propose a solution via a new multiple-input and multiple-output synthetic aperture radar (MIMO-SAR) imaging technique, that applies coherent SAR principles to vehicular MIMO radar to improve the side-view (angular) resolution. The proposed 2-stage hierarchical MIMO-SAR …
Originally developed in fields such as robotics and autonomous driving with image-based navigation in mind, deep learning-based single-image depth estimation (SIDE) has found great interest in the wider image analysis community. Remote sensing is no exception, as the possibility to estimate height maps from single aerial or satellite imagery bears great potential in the context of topographic reconstruction. A few pioneering investigations have demonstrated the general feasibility of single image height prediction from optical remote sensing images and motivate further studies in that directio…
The joint interpretation of very high resolution SAR and optical images in dense urban area are not trivial due to the distinct imaging geometry of the two types of images. Especially, the inevitable layover caused by the side-looking SAR imaging geometry renders this task even more challenging. Only until recently, the "SARptical" framework [1], [2] proposed a promising solution to tackle this. SARptical can trace individual SAR scatterers in corresponding high-resolution optical images, via rigorous 3-D reconstruction and matching. This paper introduces the SARptical dataset, which is a data…
Automotive synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems are rapidly emerging as a candidate technological solution to enable a high-resolution environment mapping for autonomous driving. Compared to lidars and cameras, automotive-legacy radars can work in any weather condition and without an external source of illumination, but are limited in either range or angular resolution. SARs offer a relevant increase in angular resolution, provided that the ego-motion of the radar platform is known along the synthetic aperture. In this paper, we present the results of an experimental campaign aimed at assess…
Automotive synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can achieve a significant angular resolution enhancement for detecting static objects, which is essential for automated driving. Obtaining high resolution SAR images requires precise ego vehicle velocity estimation. A small velocity estimation error can result in a focused SAR image with objects at offset angles. In this paper, we consider an automotive SAR system that produces SAR images of static objects based on ego vehicle velocity estimation from the radar return signal without the overhead in complexity and cost of using an auxiliary global navig…
For 3D Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging, one typical approach is to achieve the cross-track 1D focusing for each range-azimuth pixel after obtaining a stack of 2D complex-valued images. The cross-track focusing is the main difficulty as its aperture length is limited and the antenna positions are usually non-uniformly distributed. Sparsity regularization methods are widely used to tackle these problems. However, these methods are of obvious limitations. The most well-known ones are their heavy computational burdens and unsatisfied stabilities. In this letter, an efficient deep network-ba…
In this paper, we propose a novel concept of cross-learning, in order to improve SAR images by learning from the camera images. We use a multi-level abstraction approach to materialise knowledge transfer between the two modalities. We also compare the performance of other possible approaches. We provide experimental results on real data to validate the proposed concept.
SAR technology has been intensively implemented for geo-sensing and mapping purposes due to its advantages of high azimuthal resolution and weather-independent operation compared to other remote sensing technologies. Modelling SAR image data consequently becomes a prominent topic of interest, especially for data populations with impulsive signal features, which are common in SAR images of urban areas. A recently proposed model named Cauchy-Rician has manifested great potential in modelling extremely heterogeneous SAR images, yet the work only provided a MCMC-based parameter estimator that dema…
This paper presents five different statistical methods for ground scene prediction (GSP) in wavelength-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The GSP image can be used as a reference image in a change detection algorithm yielding a high probability of detection and low false alarm rate. The predictions are based on image stacks, which are composed of images from the same scene acquired at different instants with the same flight geometry. The considered methods for obtaining the ground scene prediction include (i) autoregressive models; (ii) trimmed mean; (iii) median; (iv) intensity…
To avoid decorrelation, conventional synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) requires that interferometric images should have a common spectral band and the same resolution after proper preprocessing. For a high-resolution (HR) image and a low-resolution (LR) one, the interferogram quality is limited by the LR one since the non-common band (NCB) between two images is usually discarded. In this article, we try to establish an InSAR method to improve interferogram quality by means of exploiting the NCB. To this end, we first define a new interferogram, which has the same resolution as th…
UAV SAR Imaging via Diffusion Posterior Sampling under Non-Ideal Motion in ISAC Systems
National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University（东南大学移动通信国家重点实验室）；Purple Mountain Laboratories（紫金山实验室）；Frontiers Science Center for Mobile Information Communication and Security, Southeast University（东南大学移动信息通信与安全前沿科学中心）
Geodetic stereo Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is capable of absolute three-dimensional localization of natural Persistent Scatterer (PS)s which allows for Ground Control Point (GCP) generation using only SAR data. The prerequisite for the method to achieve high precision results is the correct detection of common scatterers in SAR images acquired from different viewing geometries. In this contribution, we describe three strategies for automatic detection of identical targets in SAR images of urban areas taken from different orbit tracks. Moreover, a complete work-flow for automatic generation…
A problem with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is that, due to the poor penetrating action of electromagnetic waves inside solid bodies, the capability to observe inside distributed targets is precluded. Under these conditions, imaging action is provided only on the surface of distributed targets. The present work describes an imaging method based on the analysis of micro-movements on the Khnum-Khufu Pyramid, which are usually generated by background seismic waves. The results obtained prove to be very promising, as high-resolution full 3D tomographic imaging of the pyramid's interior and subsu…
Synthetic aperture radar tomography (TomoSAR) has been extensively employed in 3-D reconstruction in dense urban areas using high-resolution SAR acquisitions. Compressive sensing (CS)-based algorithms are generally considered as the state of the art in super-resolving TomoSAR, in particular in the single look case. This superior performance comes at the cost of extra computational burdens, because of the sparse reconstruction, which cannot be solved analytically and we need to employ computationally expensive iterative solvers. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based super-resolv…
In this paper, we analyse synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of the sea surface using an inverse problem formulation whereby Radon domain information is enhanced in order to accurately detect ship wakes. This is achieved by promoting linear features in the images. For the inverse problem-solving stage, we propose a penalty function, which combines the dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT) with the non-convex Cauchy penalty function. The solution to this inverse problem is based on the forward-backward (FB) splitting algorithm to obtain enhanced images in the Radon domain. The propose…
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is widely used for ground surface classification since it utilizes information on vegetation and soil unavailable in optical observation. Image classification often employs convolutional neural networks. However, they have serious problems such as long learning time and resolution degradation in their convolution and pooling processes. In this paper, we propose complex-valued reservoir computing (CVRC) to deal with complex-valued images in interferometric SAR (InSAR). We classify InSAR image data by using CVRC successfully with a higher resolution and a lower com…
