Taking the deep learning-based algorithms into account has become a crucial way to boost object detection performance in aerial images. While various neural network representations have been developed, previous works are still inefficient to investigate the noise-resilient performance, especially on aerial images with noise taken by the cameras with telephoto lenses, and most of the research is concentrated in the field of denoising. Of course, denoising usually requires an additional computational burden to obtain higher quality images, while noise-resilient is more of a description of the robustness of the network itself to different noises, which is an attribute of the algorithm itself. For this reason, the work will be started by analyzing the noise-resilient performance of the neural network, and then propose two hypotheses to build a noise-resilient structure. Based on these hypotheses, we compare the noise-resilient ability of the Oct-ResNet with frequency division processing and the commonly used ResNet. In addition, previous feature pyramid networks used for aerial object detection tasks are not specifically designed for the frequency division feature maps of the Oct-ResNet, and they usually lack attention to bridging the semantic gap between diverse feature maps from different depths. On the basis of this, a novel octave convolution-based semantic attention feature pyramid network (OcSaFPN) is proposed to get higher accuracy in object detection with noise. The proposed algorithm tested on three datasets demonstrates that the proposed OcSaFPN achieves a state-of-the-art detection performance with Gaussian noise or multiplicative noise. In addition, more experiments have proved that the OcSaFPN structure can be easily added to existing algorithms, and the noise-resilient ability can be effectively improved.
Object detection and classification using aerial images is a challenging task as the information regarding targets are not abundant. Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) images can be used for Automatic Target Recognition(ATR) systems as it can operate in all-weather conditions and in low light settings. But, SAR images contain salt and pepper noise(speckle noise) that cause hindrance for the deep learning models to extract meaningful features. Using just aerial view Electro-optical(EO) images for ATR systems may also not result in high accuracy as these images are of low resolution and also do not p…
The location of broken insulators in aerial images is a challenging task. This paper, focusing on the self-blast glass insulator, proposes a deep learning solution. We address the broken insulators location problem as a low signal-noise-ratio image location framework with two modules: 1) object detection based on Fast R-CNN, and 2) classification of pixels based on U-net. A diverse aerial image set of some grid in China is tested to validated the proposed approach. Furthermore, a comparison is made among different methods and the result shows that our approach is accurate and real-time.
Detection and classification of objects in aerial imagery have several applications like urban planning, crop surveillance, and traffic surveillance. However, due to the lower resolution of the objects and the effect of noise in aerial images, extracting distinguishing features for the objects is a challenge. We evaluate CenterNet, a state of the art method for real-time 2D object detection, on the VisDrone2019 dataset. We evaluate the performance of the model with different backbone networks in conjunction with varying resolutions during training and testing.
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Research Institute of Frontier Technologies（阿里巴巴-浙江大学前沿技术联合研究院）
In contrast to the generic object, aerial targets are often non-axis aligned with arbitrary orientations having the cluttered surroundings. Unlike the mainstreamed approaches regressing the bounding box orientations, this paper proposes an effective adaptive points learning approach to aerial object detection by taking advantage of the adaptive points representation, which is able to capture the geometric information of the arbitrary-oriented instances. To this end, three oriented conversion functions are presented to facilitate the classification and localization with accurate orientation. Mo…
This study deals with semantic segmentation of high-resolution (aerial) images where a semantic class label is assigned to each pixel via supervised classification as a basis for automatic map generation. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown impressive performance and have quickly become the de-facto standard for semantic segmentation, with the added benefit that task-specific feature design is no longer necessary. However, a major downside of deep learning methods is that they are extremely data-hungry, thus aggravating the perennial bottleneck of supervised classifi…
Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (MOE), Peking University（北京大学（MOE）机器感知重点实验室）；NLPR, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所NLPR）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
Aerial Image Segmentation is a particular semantic segmentation problem and has several challenging characteristics that general semantic segmentation does not have. There are two critical issues: The one is an extremely foreground-background imbalanced distribution, and the other is multiple small objects along with the complex background. Such problems make the recent dense affinity context modeling perform poorly even compared with baselines due to over-introduced background context. To handle these problems, we propose a point-wise affinity propagation module based on the Feature Pyramid N…
Indian Institute of Technology, Patna（印度理工学院巴特那分校）；Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University), Varanasi（印度理工学院（贝拿勒斯印度教大学）瓦拉纳西分校）
A change detection system takes as input two images of a region captured at two different times, and predicts which pixels in the region have undergone change over the time period. Since pixel-based analysis can be erroneous due to noise, illumination difference and other factors, contextual information is usually used to determine the class of a pixel (changed or not). This contextual information is taken into account by considering a pixel of the difference image along with its neighborhood. With the help of ground truth information, the labeled patterns are generated. Finally, Broad Learnin…
A robust and fast automatic moving object detection and tracking system is essential to characterize target object and extract spatial and temporal information for different functionalities including video surveillance systems, urban traffic monitoring and navigation, robotic. In this dissertation, I present a collaborative Spatial Pyramid Context-aware moving object detection and Tracking system. The proposed visual tracker is composed of one master tracker that usually relies on visual object features and two auxiliary trackers based on object temporal motion information that will be called …
LAF-YOLOv10 with Partial Convolution Backbone, Attention-Guided Feature Pyramid, Auxiliary P2 Head, and Wise-IoU Loss for Small Object Detection in Drone Aerial Imagery
Department of Information Technology（信息科技系）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程系）
Offloading computationally heavy tasks from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to a remote server helps improve the battery life and can help reduce resource requirements. Deep learning based state-of-the-art computer vision tasks, such as object segmentation and object detection, are computationally heavy algorithms, requiring large memory and computing power. Many UAVs are using (pretrained) off-the-shelf versions of such algorithms. Offloading such power-hungry algorithms to a remote server could help UAVs save power significantly. However, deep learning based algorithms are susceptible to no…
SOOD++: Leveraging Unlabeled Data to Boost Oriented Object Detection
School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（人工智能与自动化学院，华中科技大学）；School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（电子信息与通信学院，华中科技大学）；Baidu Inc., China（百度公司，中国）；School of Software Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（软件工程学院，华中科技大学）
Inferring spectral signatures from ground based natural images has acquired a lot of interest in applied deep learning. In contrast to the spectra of ground based images, aerial spectral images have low spatial resolution and suffer from higher noise interference. In this paper, we train a conditional adversarial network to learn an inverse mapping from a trichromatic space to 31 spectral bands within 400 to 700 nm. The network is trained on AeroCampus, a first of its kind aerial hyperspectral dataset. AeroCampus consists of high spatial resolution color images and low spatial resolution hyper…
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 …
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…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Road-boundary detection is important for autonomous driving. It can be used to constrain autonomous vehicles running on road areas to ensure driving safety. Compared with online road-boundary detection using on-vehicle cameras/Lidars, offline detection using aerial images could alleviate the severe occlusion issue. Moreover, the offline detection results can be directly employed to annotate high-definition (HD) maps. In recent years, deep-learning technologies have been used in offline detection. But there still lacks a publicly available dataset for this task, which hinders the research progr…
We propose a novel filter for segmenting the regions of interest from LiDAR 3D point cloud for multirotor aerial vehicles. It is specially targeted for real-time applications and works on sparse LiDAR point clouds without preliminary mapping. We use this filter as a crucial component of fast obstacle avoidance system for agriculture drone operating at low altitude. As the first step, each point cloud is transformed into a depth image and then identify places near to the vehicle (local maxima) by locating areas with high pixel densities. Afterwards, we merge the original depth image with identi…
Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a crucial component of situational awareness in military defense applications. With the growing use of unmanned aerial systems (UASs), MOT methods for aerial surveillance is in high demand. Application of MOT in UAS presents specific challenges such as moving sensor, changing zoom levels, dynamic background, illumination changes, obscurations and small objects. In this work, we present a robust object tracking architecture aimed to accommodate for the noise in real-time situations. We propose a kinematic prediction model, called Deep Extended Kalman Filter (DeepE…
Multi-robot systems such as swarms of aerial robots are naturally suited to offer additional flexibility, resilience, and robustness in several tasks compared to a single robot by enabling cooperation among the agents. To enhance the autonomous robot decision-making process and situational awareness, multi-robot systems have to coordinate their perception capabilities to collect, share, and fuse environment information among the agents in an efficient and meaningful way such to accurately obtain context-appropriate information or gain resilience to sensor noise or failures. In this paper, we p…
A Conditional U-Net Pipeline with Pre- and Post-Processing for Aerial RGB-to-Thermal Image Translation
Department of Data Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA（数据科学系，密歇根大学，安阿伯，MI，美国）；Department of Information Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA（信息科学系，密歇根大学，安阿伯，MI，美国）；Department of Computer Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA（计算机科学系，密歇根大学，安阿伯，MI，美国）；Arcknow, New York, USA（Arcknow，纽约，美国）；School of Environmental Sustainability, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA（可持续环境学院，密歇根大学，安阿伯，MI，美国）；SmithGroup, Ann Arbor, MI, USA（SmithGroup，安阿伯，MI，美国）；Michigan Institute for Data and AI in Society (MIDAS), University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA（密歇根数据与人工智能社会研究院（MIDAS），密歇根大学，安阿伯，MI，美国）；United States International University (USIU), Nairobi, Kenya（美国国际大学（USIU），内罗毕，肯尼亚）；Department of Learning Health Sciences, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, MI, USA（学习健康科学系，密歇根大学医学院，安阿伯，MI，美国）；Department of Pharmacology, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, MI, USA（药理学系，密歇根大学医学院，安阿伯，MI，美国）；Center for Global Health Equity, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA（全球健康公平中心，密歇根大学，安阿伯，MI，美国）
BSC of Geomatics, ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院测量与地理信息科学中心）
3D city models can be generated from aerial images. However, the calculated DSMs suffer from noise, artefacts, and data holes that have to be manually cleaned up in a time-consuming process. This work presents an approach that automatically refines such DSMs. The key idea is to teach a neural network the characteristics of urban area from reference data. In order to achieve this goal, a loss function consisting of an L1 norm and a feature loss is proposed. These features are constructed using a pre-trained image classification network. To learn to update the height maps, the network architectu…
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）
Acoustic UAV Detection in Battlefield Scenarios: Handling Noise, Domain Shift, and Weak Labels
Institute for Applied System Analysis, Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute（伊戈尔·西科尔斯基基辅理工学院应用系统分析研究所）；Zvook（兹沃克公司）；Kyiv School of Economics（基辅经济学院）
Neural 3D Object Reconstruction with Small-Scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
i2CAT Foundation（i2CAT基金会）；University of Klagenfurt（克雷格弗特大学）；Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（巴塞罗那理工大学）；Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing（电气工程与计算学院）；University of Zagreb（扎格雷布大学）；NEC Labs Europe GmbH（NEC欧洲实验室）；ICREA
Low-light environments have posed a formidable challenge for robust unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking even with state-of-the-art (SOTA) trackers since the potential image features are hard to extract under adverse light conditions. Besides, due to the low visibility, accurate online selection of the object also becomes extremely difficult for human monitors to initialize UAV tracking in ground control stations. To solve these problems, this work proposes a novel enhancer, i.e., HighlightNet, to light up potential objects for both human operators and UAV trackers. By employing Transformer,…
Purdue University Northwest（普渡大学西北校区）；University of Arkansas at Little Rock（阿肯色大学小石城分校）
Image quality is important, and can affect overall performance in image processing and computer vision as well as for numerous other reasons. Image quality assessment (IQA) is consequently a vital task in different applications from aerial photography interpretation to object detection to medical image analysis. In previous research, the BRISQUE algorithm and the PSNR algorithm were evaluated with high resolution (atleast 512x384 pixels), but relatively small image sets (no more than 4,744 images). However, scientists have not evaluated IQA algorithms on low resolution (no more than 32x32 pixe…
