Semantic segmentation of remotely sensed images plays an important role in land resource management, yield estimation, and economic assessment. U-Net, a deep encoder-decoder architecture, has been used frequently for image segmentation with high accuracy. In this Letter, we incorporate multi-scale features generated by different layers of U-Net and design a multi-scale skip connected and asymmetric-convolution-based U-Net (MACU-Net), for segmentation using fine-resolution remotely sensed images. Our design has the following advantages: (1) The multi-scale skip connections combine and realign semantic features contained in both low-level and high-level feature maps; (2) the asymmetric convolution block strengthens the feature representation and feature extraction capability of a standard convolution layer. Experiments conducted on two remotely sensed datasets captured by different satellite sensors demonstrate that the proposed MACU-Net transcends the U-Net, U-NetPPL, U-Net 3+, amongst other benchmark approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/lironui/MACU-Net.
ABES Engineering College（ABES工程学院）；Jaypee Institute of Information Technology（贾皮信息技术学院）
With the advent of remote sensing satellites, a huge repository of remotely sensed images is available. Change detection in remotely sensed images has been an active research area as it helps us understand the transitions that are taking place on the Earths surface. This paper discusses the methods and their classifications proposed by various researchers for change detection. Since use of soft computing based techniques are now very popular among research community, this paper also presents a classification based on learning techniques used in soft-computing methods for change detection.
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）；UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology（英国生态与水文中心）
Semantic segmentation using fine-resolution remotely sensed images plays a critical role in many practical applications, such as urban planning, environmental protection, natural and anthropogenic landscape monitoring, etc. However, the automation of semantic segmentation, i.e., automatic categorization/labeling and segmentation is still a challenging task, particularly for fine-resolution images with huge spatial and spectral complexity. Addressing such a problem represents an exciting research field, which paves the way for scene-level landscape pattern analysis and decision making. In this …
A generalised pre-training strategy for deep learning networks in semantic segmentation of remotely sensed images
Department of Civil Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西安交通大学利物浦大学土木工程系）；CSIRO Mineral Resources（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织矿物资源部门）；Department of Infrastructure Engineering, The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学基础设施工程系）
New York University（纽约大学）；University of the Philippines Diliman（菲律宾大学迪里曼分校）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；German Corporation for International Cooperation GmbH (GIZ)（德国国际合作机构（GIZ））
Rapid damage assessment is of crucial importance to emergency responders during hurricane events, however, the evaluation process is often slow, labor-intensive, costly, and error-prone. New advances in computer vision and remote sensing open possibilities to observe the Earth at a different scale. However, substantial pre-processing work is still required in order to apply state-of-the-art methodology for emergency response. To enable the comparison of methods for automatic detection of damaged buildings from post-hurricane remote sensing imagery taken from both airborne and satellite sensors…
Anna University（安娜大学）；Akshya College Of Engineering And Technology（阿克沙亚工程与技术学院）
Maps are used to describe far-off places . It is an aid for navigation and military strategies. Mapping of the lands are important and the mapping work is based on (i). Natural resource management & development (ii). Information technology ,(iii). Environmental development ,(iv). Facility management and (v). e-governance. The Landuse / Landcover system espoused by almost all Organisations and scientists, engineers and remote sensing community who are involved in mapping of earth surface features, is a system which is derived from the united States Geological Survey (USGS) LULC classification s…
SwinMamba: A hybrid local-global mamba framework for enhancing semantic segmentation of remotely sensed images
Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；SJTUSME-COSMOPlat Joint Research Center for New Generation Industrial Intelligent Technology（上海交通大学机械与动力工程学院-卡奥斯新一代工业智能技术联合研究中心）
Data61, CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61中心）；CSIRO Agriculture & Food（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织农业与食品研究所）；ICRAR, The University of Western Australia（西澳大利亚大学国际射电天文学研究中心）
Scene understanding of high resolution aerial images is of great importance for the task of automated monitoring in various remote sensing applications. Due to the large within-class and small between-class variance in pixel values of objects of interest, this remains a challenging task. In recent years, deep convolutional neural networks have started being used in remote sensing applications and demonstrate state of the art performance for pixel level classification of objects. \textcolor{black}{Here we propose a reliable framework for performant results for the task of semantic segmentation …
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）；UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology（英国生态与水文中心）；University of Twente（特文特大学）
Assigning geospatial objects with specific categories at the pixel level is a fundamental task in remote sensing image analysis. Along with rapid development in sensor technologies, remotely sensed images can be captured at multiple spatial resolutions (MSR) with information content manifested at different scales. Extracting information from these MSR images represents huge opportunities for enhanced feature representation and characterisation. However, MSR images suffer from two critical issues: 1) increased scale variation of geo-objects and 2) loss of detailed information at coarse spatial …
Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, NCSR Demokritos（希腊德谟克利特国家研究中心信息与通信研究所）；University of West Attica（西阿提卡大学）；Helenic Air Force Academy（希腊空军学院）；The City College of New York（纽约市立学院）；Map Ltd（Map有限公司）
In this work, very deep super-resolution (VDSR) method is presented for improving the spatial resolution of remotely sensed (RS) images for scale factor 4. The VDSR net is re-trained with Sentinel-2 images and with drone aero orthophoto images, thus becomes RS-VDSR and Aero-VDSR, respectively. A novel loss function, the Var-norm estimator, is proposed in the regression layer of the convolutional neural network during re-training and prediction. According to numerical and optical comparisons, the proposed nets RS-VDSR and Aero-VDSR can outperform VDSR during prediction with RS images. RS-VDSR o…
Remotely sensed images may contain some missing areas because of poor weather conditions and sensor failure. Information of those areas may play an important role in the interpretation of multitemporal remotely sensed data. The paper aims at reconstructing the missing information by a non-local low-rank tensor completion method (NL-LRTC). First, nonlocal correlations in the spatial domain are taken into account by searching and grouping similar image patches in a large search window. Then low-rankness of the identified 4-order tensor groups is promoted to consider their correlations in spatial…
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）；Purdue University（普渡大学）
We tackle the problem of image inpainting in the remote sensing domain. Remote sensing images possess high resolution and geographical variations, that render the conventional inpainting methods less effective. This further entails the requirement of models with high complexity to sufficiently capture the spectral, spatial and textural nuances within an image, emerging from its high spatial variability. To this end, we propose a novel inpainting method that individually focuses on each aspect of an image such as edges, colour and texture using a task specific GAN. Moreover, each individual GAN…
The difficulty in obtaining labeled data relevant to a given task is among the most common and well-known practical obstacles to applying deep learning techniques to new or even slightly modified domains. The data volumes required by the current generation of supervised learning algorithms typically far exceed what a human needs to learn and complete a given task. We investigate ways to expand a given labeled corpus of remote sensed imagery into a larger corpus using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We then measure how these additional synthetic data affect supervised machine learning p…
Despite the plethora of successful Super-Resolution Reconstruction (SRR) models applied to natural images, their application to remote sensing imagery tends to produce poor results. Remote sensing imagery is often more complicated than natural images and has its peculiarities such as being of lower resolution, it contains noise, and often depicting large textured surfaces. As a result, applying non-specialized SRR models on remote sensing imagery results in artifacts and poor reconstructions. To address these problems, this paper proposes an architecture inspired by previous research work, int…
The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；Michigan Technological University（密歇根理工大学）
As an important application in remote sensing, landcover classification remains one of the most challenging tasks in very-high-resolution (VHR) image analysis. As the rapidly increasing number of Deep Learning (DL) based landcover methods and training strategies are claimed to be the state-of-the-art, the already fragmented technical landscape of landcover mapping methods has been further complicated. Although there exists a plethora of literature review work attempting to guide researchers in making an informed choice of landcover mapping methods, the articles either focus on the review of ap…
Cloud detection is a specialized application of image recognition and object detection using remotely sensed data. The task presents a number of challenges, including analyzing images obtained in visible, infrared and multi-spectral frequencies, usually without ground truth data for comparison. Moreover, machine learning and deep learning (MLDL) algorithms applied to this task are required to be computationally efficient, as they are typically deployed in low-power devices and called to operate in real-time. This paper explains Wavelet Transform (WT) theory, comparing it to more widely used im…
Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Middle East Technical University（中东技术大学）
A new segmentation fusion method is proposed that ensembles the output of several segmentation algorithms applied on a remotely sensed image. The candidate segmentation sets are processed to achieve a consensus segmentation using a stochastic optimization algorithm based on the Filtered Stochastic BOEM (Best One Element Move) method. For this purpose, Filtered Stochastic BOEM is reformulated as a segmentation fusion problem by designing a new distance learning approach. The proposed algorithm also embeds the computation of the optimum number of clusters into the segmentation fusion problem.
Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学）；PIC4SeR（都灵理工大学跨部门服务机器人中心）
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been consistently proved state-of-the-art results in image Super-Resolution (SR), representing an exceptional opportunity for the remote sensing field to extract further information and knowledge from captured data. However, most of the works published in the literature have been focusing on the Single-Image Super-Resolution problem so far. At present, satellite based remote sensing platforms offer huge data availability with high temporal resolution and low spatial resolution. In this context, the presented research proposes a novel residual attention…
Semantic segmentation of remotely sensed images plays a crucial role in precision agriculture, environmental protection, and economic assessment. In recent years, substantial fine-resolution remote sensing images are available for semantic segmentation. However, due to the complicated information caused by the increased spatial resolution, state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms normally utilize complex network architectures for segmentation, which usually incurs high computational complexity. Specifically, the high-caliber performance of the convolutional neural network (CNN) heavily relies…
Remote Sensing Technology Institute, German Aerospace Center（德国航空航天中心遥感技术研究所）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；TJ Watson Research Center, IBM Research（IBM研究院托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）
We present and evaluate a weakly-supervised methodology to quantify the spatio-temporal distribution of urban forests based on remotely sensed data with close-to-zero human interaction. Successfully training machine learning models for semantic segmentation typically depends on the availability of high-quality labels. We evaluate the benefit of high-resolution, three-dimensional point cloud data (LiDAR) as source of noisy labels in order to train models for the localization of trees in orthophotos. As proof of concept we sense Hurricane Sandy's impact on urban forests in Coney Island, New York…
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）；UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology（英国生态与水文中心）
The fully convolutional network (FCN) with an encoder-decoder architecture has been the standard paradigm for semantic segmentation. The encoder-decoder architecture utilizes an encoder to capture multilevel feature maps, which are incorporated into the final prediction by a decoder. As the context is crucial for precise segmentation, tremendous effort has been made to extract such information in an intelligent fashion, including employing dilated/atrous convolutions or inserting attention modules. However, these endeavors are all based on the FCN architecture with ResNet or other backbones, w…
Most semantic segmentation approaches of Hyperspectral images (HSIs) use and require preprocessing steps in the form of patching to accurately classify diversified land cover in remotely sensed images. These approaches use patching to incorporate the rich neighborhood information in images and exploit the simplicity and segmentability of the most common HSI datasets. In contrast, most landmasses in the world consist of overlapping and diffused classes, making neighborhood information weaker than what is seen in common HSI datasets. To combat this issue and generalize the segmentation models to…
The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）
Being able to effectively identify clouds and monitor their evolution is one important step toward more accurate quantitative precipitation estimation and forecast. In this study, a new gradient-based cloud-image segmentation technique is developed using tools from image processing techniques. This method integrates morphological image gradient magnitudes to separable cloud systems and patches boundaries. A varying scale-kernel is implemented to reduce the sensitivity of image segmentation to noise and capture objects with various finenesses of the edges in remote-sensing images. The proposed …
University of Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
Change detection is one of the most challenging issues when analyzing remotely sensed images. Comparing several multi-date images acquired through the same kind of sensor is the most common scenario. Conversely, designing robust, flexible and scalable algorithms for change detection becomes even more challenging when the images have been acquired by two different kinds of sensors. This situation arises in case of emergency under critical constraints. This paper presents, to the best of authors' knowledge, the first strategy to deal with optical images characterized by dissimilar spatial and sp…
Accurate land cover segmentation of spectral images is challenging and has drawn widespread attention in remote sensing due to its inherent complexity. Although significant efforts have been made for developing a variety of methods, most of them rely on supervised strategies. Subspace clustering methods, such as Sparse Subspace Clustering (SSC), have become a popular tool for unsupervised learning due to their high performance. However, the computational complexity of SSC methods prevents their use on large spectral remotely sensed datasets. Furthermore, since SSC ignores the spatial informati…
