Despite the remarkable advances in visual saliency analysis for natural scene images (NSIs), salient object detection (SOD) for optical remote sensing images (RSIs) still remains an open and challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Dense Attention Fluid Network (DAFNet) for SOD in optical RSIs. A Global Context-aware Attention (GCA) module is proposed to adaptively capture long-range semantic context relationships, and is further embedded in a Dense Attention Fluid (DAF) structure that enables shallow attention cues flow into deep layers to guide the generation of high-level feature attention maps. Specifically, the GCA module is composed of two key components, where the global feature aggregation module achieves mutual reinforcement of salient feature embeddings from any two spatial locations, and the cascaded pyramid attention module tackles the scale variation issue by building up a cascaded pyramid framework to progressively refine the attention map in a coarse-to-fine manner. In addition, we construct a new and challenging optical RSI dataset for SOD that contains 2,000 images with pixel-wise saliency annotations, which is currently the largest publicly available benchmark. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed DAFNet significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art SOD competitors. https://github.com/rmcong/DAFNet_TIP20
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；University of Leicester（莱斯特大学）
Due to the more dramatic multi-scale variations and more complicated foregrounds and backgrounds in optical remote sensing images (RSIs), the salient object detection (SOD) for optical RSIs becomes a huge challenge. However, different from natural scene images (NSIs), the discussion on the optical RSI SOD task still remains scarce. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale context network, namely MSCNet, for SOD in optical RSIs. Specifically, a multi-scale context extraction module is adopted to address the scale variation of salient objects by effectively learning multi-scale contextual informa…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI)（人工智能初始研究所）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Existing CNNs-based salient object detection (SOD) heavily depends on the large-scale pixel-level annotations, which is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive. By contrast, the sparse annotations become appealing to the salient object detection community. However, few efforts are devoted to learning salient object detection from sparse annotations, especially in the remote sensing field. In addition, the sparse annotation usually contains scanty information, which makes it challenging to train a well-performing model, resulting in its performance largely lagging behind the fully-superv…
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；City University of Hong Kong Shenzhen Research Institute（香港城市大学深圳研究院）；Tianjin University（天津大学）
Arising from the various object types and scales, diverse imaging orientations, and cluttered backgrounds in optical remote sensing image (RSI), it is difficult to directly extend the success of salient object detection for nature scene image to the optical RSI. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep network called LV-Net based on the shape of network architecture, which detects salient objects from optical RSIs in a purely data-driven fashion. The proposed LV-Net consists of two key modules, i.e., a two-stream pyramid module (L-shaped module) and an encoder-decoder module with nested co…
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；University of Leicester（莱斯特大学）
Due to the extreme complexity of scale and shape as well as the uncertainty of the predicted location, salient object detection in optical remote sensing images (RSI-SOD) is a very difficult task. The existing SOD methods can satisfy the detection performance for natural scene images, but they are not well adapted to RSI-SOD due to the above-mentioned image characteristics in remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a novel Attention Guided Network (AGNet) for SOD in optical RSIs, including position enhancement stage and detail refinement stage. Specifically, the position enhancement s…
Salient object detection (SOD) in optical remote sensing images (RSIs), or RSI-SOD, is an emerging topic in understanding optical RSIs. However, due to the difference between optical RSIs and natural scene images (NSIs), directly applying NSI-SOD methods to optical RSIs fails to achieve satisfactory results. In this paper, we propose a novel Adjacent Context Coordination Network (ACCoNet) to explore the coordination of adjacent features in an encoder-decoder architecture for RSI-SOD. Specifically, ACCoNet consists of three parts: an encoder, Adjacent Context Coordination Modules (ACCoMs), and …
Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Hunan University（湖南大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；City University of Hong Kong Shenzhen Research Institute（香港城市大学深圳研究院）
Salient object detection (SOD) for optical remote sensing images (RSIs) aims at locating and extracting visually distinctive objects/regions from the optical RSIs. Despite some saliency models were proposed to solve the intrinsic problem of optical RSIs (such as complex background and scale-variant objects), the accuracy and completeness are still unsatisfactory. To this end, we propose a relational reasoning network with parallel multi-scale attention for SOD in optical RSIs in this paper. The relational reasoning module that integrates the spatial and the channel dimensions is designed to in…
School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University（天津大学电气与信息工程学院）；Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学信息科学研究所）；Beijing Key Laboratory of Advanced Information Science and Network Technology（北京市先进信息科学与网络技术重点实验室）；School of Software Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学软件工程学院）；Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学计算机科学系）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学计算机科学与工程系）
The diverse spatial resolutions, various object types, scales and orientations, and cluttered backgrounds in optical remote sensing images (RSIs) challenge the current salient object detection (SOD) approaches. It is commonly unsatisfactory to directly employ the SOD approaches designed for nature scene images (NSIs) to RSIs. In this paper, we propose a novel Parallel Down-up Fusion network (PDF-Net) for SOD in optical RSIs, which takes full advantage of the in-path low- and high-level features and cross-path multi-resolution features to distinguish diversely scaled salient objects and suppres…
G2HFNet: GeoGran-Aware Hierarchical Feature Fusion Network for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images
School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University（控制科学与工程学院，山东大学）；State Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems（自主智能无人系统国家重点实验室）；School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University（自动化学院，杭州电子科技大学）；School of information engineering, Huzhou University（信息工程学院，湖州大学）；School of Data Science, Lingnan University（数据科学学院，岭南大学）
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI)（起源人工智能研究院）；CETC Special Mission Aircraft System Engineering Co.Ltd（中国电子科技集团特种任务飞机系统工程技术有限公司）
Object detection is an important task in remote sensing image analysis. To reduce the computational complexity of redundant information and improve the efficiency of image processing, visual saliency models have been widely applied in this field. In this paper, a novel saliency detection model based on Contrast-weighted Dictionary Learning (CDL) is proposed for remote sensing images. Specifically, the proposed CDL learns salient and non-salient atoms from positive and negative samples to construct a discriminant dictionary, in which a contrast-weighted term is proposed to encourage the contras…
Generic Knowledge Boosted Pre-training For Remote Sensing Images
State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学虚拟现实技术与系统国家重点实验室）；Hangzhou Innovation Institute, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学杭州创新研究院）；School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University（北京大学软件与微电子学院）
Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science（上海先进通信与数据科学研究院）；Shanghai University（上海大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）
Salient object detection in optical remote sensing images (ORSI-SOD) has been widely explored for understanding ORSIs. However, previous methods focus mainly on improving the detection accuracy while neglecting the cost in memory and computation, which may hinder their real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight ORSI-SOD solution, named CorrNet, to address these issues. In CorrNet, we first lighten the backbone (VGG-16) and build a lightweight subnet for feature extraction. Then, following the coarse-to-fine strategy, we generate an initial coarse saliency map from h…
With the development of remote sensing technology, the acquisition of remote sensing images is easier and easier, which provides sufficient data resources for the task of detecting remote sensing objects. However, how to detect objects quickly and accurately from many complex optical remote sensing images is a challenging hot issue. In this paper, we propose an efficient anchor free object detector, CenterFPANet. To pursue speed, we use a lightweight backbone and introduce the asymmetric revolution block. To improve the accuracy, we designed the FPA module, which links the feature maps of diff…
Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院电子学研究所）
Cloud-based overlays are often present in optical remote sensing images, thus limiting the application of acquired data. Removing clouds is an indispensable pre-processing step in remote sensing image analysis. Deep learning has achieved great success in the field of remote sensing in recent years, including scene classification and change detection. However, deep learning is rarely applied in remote sensing image removal clouds. The reason is the lack of data sets for training neural networks. In order to solve this problem, this paper first proposed the Remote sensing Image Cloud rEmoving da…
The proliferation of remote sensing satellites has resulted in a massive amount of remote sensing images. However, due to human and material resource constraints, the vast majority of remote sensing images remain unlabeled. As a result, it cannot be applied to currently available deep learning methods. To fully utilize the remaining unlabeled images, we propose a Geographical Knowledge-driven Representation learning method for remote sensing images (GeoKR), improving network performance and reduce the demand for annotated data. The global land cover products and geographical location associate…
Remote sensing semantic segmentation aims to assign automatically each pixel on aerial images with specific label. In this letter, we proposed a new module, called improved-flow warp module (IFWM), to adjust semantic feature maps across different scales for remote sensing semantic segmentation. The improved-flow warp module is applied along with the feature extraction process in the convolutional neural network. First, IFWM computes the offsets of pixels by a learnable way, which can alleviate the misalignment of the multi-scale features. Second, the offsets help with the low-resolution deep f…
Thanks to recent advances in CNNs, solid improvements have been made in semantic segmentation of high resolution remote sensing imagery. However, most of the previous works have not fully taken into account the specific difficulties that exist in remote sensing tasks. One of such difficulties is that objects are small and crowded in remote sensing imagery. To tackle with this challenging task we have proposed a novel architecture called local feature extraction (LFE) module attached on top of dilated front-end module. The LFE module is based on our findings that aggressively increasing dilatio…
Beyond Global Scanning: Adaptive Visual State Space Modeling for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images
School of Computer Science and Technology, Hainan University（海南大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University（山东大学控制科学与工程学院）
In recent years, supervised learning has been widely used in various tasks of optical remote sensing image understanding, including remote sensing image classification, pixel-wise segmentation, change detection, and object detection. The methods based on supervised learning need a large amount of high-quality training data and their performance highly depends on the quality of the labels. However, in practical remote sensing applications, it is often expensive and time-consuming to obtain large-scale data sets with high-quality labels, which leads to a lack of sufficient supervised information…
RS-YOLOX: A High Precision Detector for Object Detection in Satellite Remote Sensing Images
School of Information Science and Engineering, Yunnan University（云南大学信息科学与工程学院）；Yunnan Key Laboratory of Intelligent Systems and Computing（云南省智能系统与计算重点实验室）
Recent research on remote sensing object detection has largely focused on improving the representation of oriented bounding boxes but has overlooked the unique prior knowledge presented in remote sensing scenarios. Such prior knowledge can be useful because tiny remote sensing objects may be mistakenly detected without referencing a sufficiently long-range context, and the long-range context required by different types of objects can vary. In this paper, we take these priors into account and propose the Large Selective Kernel Network (LSKNet). LSKNet can dynamically adjust its large spatial re…
Accurate and robust detection of multi-class objects in optical remote sensing images is essential to many real-world applications such as urban planning, traffic control, searching and rescuing, etc. However, state-of-the-art object detection techniques designed for images captured using ground-level sensors usually experience a sharp performance drop when directly applied to remote sensing images, largely due to the object appearance differences in remote sensing images in term of sparse texture, low contrast, arbitrary orientations, large scale variations, etc. This paper presents a novel o…
RemoteDet-Mamba: A Hybrid Mamba-CNN Network for Multi-modal Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images
School of Computer Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China（计算机科学学院，北京邮电大学）；School of Electronic Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China（电子工程学院，北京邮电大学）
Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院电子学研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Deep learning based object detection has achieved great success. However, these supervised learning methods are data-hungry and time-consuming. This restriction makes them unsuitable for limited data and urgent tasks, especially in the applications of remote sensing. Inspired by the ability of humans to quickly learn new visual concepts from very few examples, we propose a training-free, one-shot geospatial object detection framework for remote sensing images. It consists of (1) a feature extractor with remote sensing domain knowledge, (2) a multi-level feature fusion method, (3) a novel simil…
Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science, Shanghai University（上海大学上海先进通信与数据科学研究院）；School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University（上海大学通信与信息工程学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University（石溪大学计算机科学系）
In the computer vision community, great progresses have been achieved in salient object detection from natural scene images (NSI-SOD); by contrast, salient object detection in optical remote sensing images (RSI-SOD) remains to be a challenging emerging topic. The unique characteristics of optical RSIs, such as scales, illuminations and imaging orientations, bring significant differences between NSI-SOD and RSI-SOD. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Content Complementation Network (MCCNet) to explore the complementarity of multiple content for RSI-SOD. Specifically, MCCNet is based on the…
High-resolution images for remote sensing applications are often not affordable or accessible, especially when in need of a wide temporal span of recordings. Given the easy access to low-resolution (LR) images from satellites, many remote sensing works rely on this type of data. The problem is that LR images are not appropriate for semantic segmentation, due to the need for high-quality data for accurate pixel prediction for this task. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework that unites a super-resolution and a semantic segmentation module in order to produce accurate thematic maps f…
Breaking the Box: Enhancing Remote Sensing Image Segmentation with Freehand Sketches
Huzhou University（湖州大学）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；KOKONI 3D, Moxin (Huzhou) Tech. Co., LTD.（墨芯（湖州）科技有限公司（KOKONI 3D））
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, CAS（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Beijing Futong Dongfang Technology Co, Ltd（北京富通东方科技有限公司）；Beijing University of Chemical Technology（北京化工大学）
Robust semantic segmentation of VHR remote sensing images from UAV sensors is critical for earth observation, land use, land cover or mapping applications. Several factors such as shadows, weather disruption and camera shakes making this problem highly challenging, especially only using RGB images. In this paper, we propose the use of multi-modality data including NIR, RGB and DSM to increase robustness of segmentation in blurred or partially damaged VHR remote sensing images. By proposing a cascaded dense encoder-decoder network and the SELayer based fusion and assembling techniques, the prop…
RDNet: Region Proportion-Aware Dynamic Adaptive Salient Object Detection Network in Optical Remote Sensing Images
School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University（控制科学与工程学院，山东大学）；Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and System Control, Ministry of Education（教育部智能信息与系统控制重点实验室）；School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University（自动化学院，杭州电子科技大学）；School of Mathematics and Computer Science, Lishui University（数学与计算机科学学院，丽水大学）；School of Data Science, Lingnan University（数据科学学院，岭南大学）
Convolutional neural networks are currently the state-of-the-art algorithms for many remote sensing applications such as semantic segmentation or object detection. However, these algorithms are extremely sensitive to over-fitting, domain change and adversarial examples specifically designed to fool them. While adversarial attacks are not a threat in most remote sensing applications, one could wonder if strengthening networks to adversarial attacks could also increase their resilience to over-fitting and their ability to deal with the inherent variety of worldwide data. In this work, we study b…
Boundary-semantic collaborative guidance network with dual-stream feedback mechanism for salient object detection in optical remote sensing imagery
State-Province Joint Engineering Laboratory of Spatial Information Technology of High-Speed Rail Safety, Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学高速铁路安全空间信息技术省部共建工程实验室）
the University of Tokyo（东京大学）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）；Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University（京都大学防灾研究所）；RIKEN Center for Computational Science（理化学研究所计算科学中心）；Hiroshima University（广岛大学）
We propose a framework that estimates inundation depth (maximum water level) and debris-flow-induced topographic deformation from remote sensing imagery by integrating deep learning and numerical simulation. A water and debris flow simulator generates training data for various artificial disaster scenarios. We show that regression models based on Attention U-Net and LinkNet architectures trained on such synthetic data can predict the maximum water level and topographic deformation from a remote sensing-derived change detection map and a digital elevation model. The proposed framework has an in…
Remote sensing change detection, identifying changes between scenes of the same location, is an active area of research with a broad range of applications. Recent advances in multimodal self-supervised pretraining have resulted in state-of-the-art methods which surpass vision models trained solely on optical imagery. In the remote sensing field, there is a wealth of overlapping 2D and 3D modalities which can be exploited to supervise representation learning in vision models. In this paper we propose Contrastive Surface-Image Pretraining (CSIP) for joint learning using optical RGB and above gro…
Recent advances in computer vision using deep learning with RGB imagery (e.g., object recognition and detection) have been made possible thanks to the development of large annotated RGB image datasets. In contrast, multispectral image (MSI) and hyperspectral image (HSI) datasets contain far fewer labeled images, in part due to the wide variety of sensors used. These annotations are especially limited for semantic segmentation, or pixel-wise classification, of remote sensing imagery because it is labor intensive to generate image annotations. Low-shot learning algorithms can make effective infe…
Diverse Instance Generation via Diffusion Models for Enhanced Few-Shot Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images
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）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Skolkovo institute of Science and technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究所）
Recent developments in the remote sensing systems and image processing made it possible to propose a new method of the object classification and detection of the specific changes in the series of satellite Earth images (so called targeted change detection). In this paper we propose a formal problem statement that allows to use effectively the deep learning approach to analyze time-dependent series of remote sensing images. We also introduce a new framework for the development of deep learning models for targeted change detection and demonstrate some cases of business applications it can be use…
Beijing Forestry University（北京林业大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Chinese Institute for Brain Research (CIBR)（中国脑科学研究中心（CIBR））
Extracting cultivated land accurately from high-resolution remote images is a basic task for precision agriculture. This report introduces our solution to the iFLYTEK challenge 2021 cultivated land extraction from high-resolution remote sensing image. The challenge requires segmenting cultivated land objects in very high-resolution multispectral remote sensing images. We established a highly effective and efficient pipeline to solve this problem. We first divided the original images into small tiles and separately performed instance segmentation on each tile. We explored several instance segme…
Carlson Center for Imaging Science, Rochester Institute of Technology（卡尔森成像科学中心，罗切斯特理工学院）
Deep learning continues to push state-of-the-art performance for the semantic segmentation of color (i.e., RGB) imagery; however, the lack of annotated data for many remote sensing sensors (i.e. hyperspectral imagery (HSI)) prevents researchers from taking advantage of this recent success. Since generating sensor specific datasets is time intensive and cost prohibitive, remote sensing researchers have embraced deep unsupervised feature extraction. Although these methods have pushed state-of-the-art performance on current HSI benchmarks, many of these tools are not readily accessible to many re…
