Deep learning provides a powerful new approach to many computer vision tasks. Height prediction from aerial images is one of those tasks that benefited greatly from the deployment of deep learning which replaced old multi-view geometry techniques. This letter proposes a two-stage approach, where first a multi-task neural network is used to predict the height map resulting from a single RGB aerial input image. We also include a second refinement step, where a denoising autoencoder is used to produce higher quality height maps. Experiments on two publicly available datasets show that our method is capable of producing state-of-the-art results. Code is available at https://github.com/melhousni/DSMNet.
Understanding the 3D geometric structure of the Earth's surface has been an active research topic in photogrammetry and remote sensing community for decades, serving as an essential building block for various applications such as 3D digital city modeling, change detection, and city management. Previous researches have extensively studied the problem of height estimation from aerial images based on stereo or multi-view image matching. These methods require two or more images from different perspectives to reconstruct 3D coordinates with camera information provided. In this paper, we deal with t…
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；University of Leicester（莱斯特大学）
Object detection is one of the most fundamental yet challenging research topics in the domain of computer vision. Recently, the study on this topic in aerial images has made tremendous progress. However, complex background and worse imaging quality are obvious problems in aerial object detection. Most state-of-the-art approaches tend to develop elaborate attention mechanisms for the space-time feature calibrations with arduous computational complexity, while surprisingly ignoring the importance of feature calibrations in channel-wise. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective Calibrated-…
ONERA（法国航空航天实验室）；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；Université Paris Descartes（巴黎笛卡尔大学）
Aerial or satellite imagery is a great source for land surface analysis, which might yield land use maps or elevation models. In this investigation, we present a neural network framework for learning semantics and local height together. We show how this joint multi-task learning benefits to each task on the large dataset of the 2018 Data Fusion Contest. Moreover, our framework also yields an uncertainty map which allows assessing the prediction of the model. Code is available at https://github.com/marcelampc/mtl_aerial_images .
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；University of Twente（特文特大学）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
The past years have witnessed great progress on remote sensing (RS) image interpretation and its wide applications. With RS images becoming more accessible than ever before, there is an increasing demand for the automatic interpretation of these images. In this context, the benchmark datasets serve as essential prerequisites for developing and testing intelligent interpretation algorithms. After reviewing existing benchmark datasets in the research community of RS image interpretation, this article discusses the problem of how to efficiently prepare a suitable benchmark dataset for RS image in…
Towards Real-World Aerial Vision Guidance with Categorical 6D Pose Tracker
Hunan University（湖南大学）；National Engineering Research Centre for Robot Visual Perception and Control（国家机器人视觉感知与控制技术工程研究中心）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
New York University（纽约大学）；NYU Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）
Recent studies have shown the benefits of using additional elevation data (e.g., DSM) for enhancing the performance of the semantic segmentation of aerial images. However, previous methods mostly adopt 3D elevation information as additional inputs. While in many real-world applications, one does not have the corresponding DSM information at hand and the spatial resolution of acquired DSM images usually do not match the aerial images. To alleviate this data constraint and also take advantage of 3D elevation information, in this paper, we introduce a geometry-aware segmentation model that achiev…
Progressive Self-Distillation for Ground-to-Aerial Perception Knowledge Transfer
Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳市人工智能与机器人研究院）；South China Normal University（华南师范大学）；Samsung Research（三星研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
Geometry-Aware Cross-Height Channel Knowledge Map Prediction for UAV-Assisted Communications With Uncertainty-Guided 3D Sensing
National Key Laboratory of Wireless Communications, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC)（电子科技大学无线通信国家重点实验室）；SDAIA-KFUPM Joint Research Centre of AI, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals（沙特数据和人工智能局-法赫德国王石油矿产大学人工智能联合研究中心）；School of Science, Technology and Engineering, University of the Sunshine Coast（阳光海岸大学科学技术与工程学院）；Anhui Science and Technology University（安徽科技学院）；College of Telecommunications and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学通信与信息工程学院）
DAPM: UAV Monocular Depth Estimation from Any Height, Pitch, Roll and FOV
Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院空天信息创新研究院）；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）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Key Laboratory of Target Cognition and Application Technology (TCAT), Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院空天信息创新研究院目标认知与应用技术重点实验室）
Estimating the heightmaps of buildings and vegetation in single remotely sensed images is a challenging problem. Effective solutions to this problem can comprise the stepping stone for solving complex and demanding problems that require 3D information of aerial imagery in the remote sensing discipline, which might be expensive or not feasible to require. We propose a task-focused Deep Learning (DL) model that takes advantage of the shadow map of a remotely sensed image to calculate its heightmap. The shadow is computed efficiently and does not add significant computation complexity. The model …
As an emerging vision platform, a drone can look from many abnormal viewpoints which brings many new challenges into the classic vision task of video saliency prediction. To investigate these challenges, this paper proposes a large-scale video dataset for aerial saliency prediction, which consists of ground-truth salient object regions of 1,000 aerial videos, annotated by 24 subjects. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first large-scale video dataset that focuses on visual saliency prediction on drones. Based on this dataset, we propose a Model-guided Multi-path Network (MM-Net) that serv…
University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）；East Carolina University（东卡罗来纳大学）
Object detection in high-resolution aerial images is a challenging task because of 1) the large variation in object size, and 2) non-uniform distribution of objects. A common solution is to divide the large aerial image into small (uniform) crops and then apply object detection on each small crop. In this paper, we investigate the image cropping strategy to address these challenges. Specifically, we propose a Density-Map guided object detection Network (DMNet), which is inspired from the observation that the object density map of an image presents how objects distribute in terms of the pixel i…
Université Gustave Eiffel（古斯塔夫·埃菲尔大学）；ENSG（法国国立地理科学学院）；IGN（法国国家地理和森林信息研究所）；INRAE（法国国家农业、食品与环境研究院）；Université de Bordeaux（波尔多大学）；Bordeaux INP（波尔多国立理工学院）；Université Bordeaux Montaigne（波尔多蒙田大学）
The analysis of the multi-layer structure of wild forests is an important challenge of automated large-scale forestry. While modern aerial LiDARs offer geometric information across all vegetation layers, most datasets and methods focus only on the segmentation and reconstruction of the top of canopy. We release WildForest3D, which consists of 29 study plots and over 2000 individual trees across 47 000m2 with dense 3D annotation, along with occupancy and height maps for 3 vegetation layers: ground vegetation, understory, and overstory. We propose a 3D deep network architecture predicting for th…
Oriented bounding box regression is crucial for oriented object detection. However, regression-based methods often suffer from boundary problems and the inconsistency between loss and evaluation metrics. In this paper, a modulated Kalman IoU loss of approximate SkewIoU is proposed, named MKIoU. To avoid boundary problems, we convert the oriented bounding box to Gaussian distribution, then use the Kalman filter to approximate the intersection area. However, there exists significant difference between the calculated and actual intersection areas. Thus, we propose a modulation factor to adjust th…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are used successfully in many application areas such as military, security, monitoring, emergency aid, tourism, agriculture, and forestry. This study aims to automatically count trees in designated areas on the Siirt University campus from high-resolution images obtained by UAV. Images obtained at 30 meters height with 20% overlap were stitched offline at the ground station using Adobe Photoshop's photo merge tool. The resulting image was denoised and smoothed by applying the 3x3 median and mean filter, respectively. After generating the orthophoto map of the aer…
Oriented object detection in aerial images is a challenging task as the objects in aerial images are displayed in arbitrary directions and are usually densely packed. Current oriented object detection methods mainly rely on two-stage anchor-based detectors. However, the anchor-based detectors typically suffer from a severe imbalance issue between the positive and negative anchor boxes. To address this issue, in this work we extend the horizontal keypoint-based object detector to the oriented object detection task. In particular, we first detect the center keypoints of the objects, based on whi…
Remote Sensing Technology Institute (IMF), German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心遥感技术研究所（IMF））；Signal Processing in Earth Observation (SiPEO), Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学地球观测信号处理研究所（SiPEO））
In this paper we tackle a very novel problem, namely height estimation from a single monocular remote sensing image, which is inherently ambiguous, and a technically ill-posed problem, with a large source of uncertainty coming from the overall scale. We propose a fully convolutional-deconvolutional network architecture being trained end-to-end, encompassing residual learning, to model the ambiguous mapping between monocular remote sensing images and height maps. Specifically, it is composed of two parts, i.e., convolutional sub-network and deconvolutional sub-network. The former corresponds to…
Texas A&M University（德克萨斯A&M大学）；Mississippi State University（密西西比州立大学）；U.S.D.A. Agriculture Research Service（美国农业部农业研究局）；Utah State University（犹他州立大学）
Plastic shopping bags that get carried away from the side of roads and tangled on cotton plants can end up at cotton gins if not removed before the harvest. Such bags may not only cause problem in the ginning process but might also get embodied in cotton fibers reducing its quality and marketable value. Therefore, it is required to detect, locate, and remove the bags before cotton is harvested. Manually detecting and locating these bags in cotton fields is labor intensive, time-consuming and a costly process. To solve these challenges, we present application of four variants of YOLOv5 (YOLOv5s…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工学院暨州立大学）；University of Maryland at College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）
Cross-view matching refers to the problem of finding the closest match for a given query ground view image to one from a database of aerial images. If the aerial images are geotagged, then the closest matching aerial image can be used to localize the query ground view image. Due to the recent success of deep learning methods, several cross-view matching techniques have been proposed. These approaches perform well for the matching of isolated query images. However, their evaluation over a trajectory is limited. In this paper, we evaluate cross-view matching for the task of localizing a ground v…
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…
Shanghai University of Engineering Science（上海工程技术大学）；Shanghai University（上海大学）
Cross-view image matching aims to match images of the same target scene acquired from different platforms. With the rapid development of drone technology, cross-view matching by neural network models has been a widely accepted choice for drone position or navigation. However, existing public datasets do not include images obtained by drones at different heights, and the types of scenes are relatively homogeneous, which yields issues in assessing a model's capability to adapt to complex and changing scenes. In this end, we present a new cross-view dataset called SUES-200 to address these issues…
OS-W2S: An Automatic Labeling Engine for Language-Guided Open-Set Aerial Object Detection
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Intellifusion Inc.（Intellifusion公司）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Zhejiang Lab（浙江实验室）；Yan’an University（延安大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Space Research（德国航空航天中心（DLR）空间研究所）；Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente（代尔夫特理工大学地理信息科学与地球观测学院）
This article describes a software package called ROS georegistration intended for use with the Robot Operating System (ROS) and the Gazebo 3D simulation environment. ROSgeoregistration provides tools for the simulation, test and deployment of aerial georegistration algorithms and is made available with a link provided in the paper. A model creation package is provided which downloads multi-spectral images from the Google Earth Engine database and, if necessary, incorporates these images into a single, possibly very large, reference image. Additionally a Gazebo plugin which uses the real-time s…
