This article aims to investigate how circuit-based hybrid Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks (QCNNs) can be successfully employed as image classifiers in the context of remote sensing. The hybrid QCNNs enrich the classical architecture of CNNs by introducing a quantum layer within a standard neural network. The novel QCNN proposed in this work is applied to the Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) classification, chosen as an Earth Observation (EO) use case, and tested on the EuroSAT dataset used as reference benchmark. The results of the multiclass classification prove the effectiveness of the presented approach, by demonstrating that the QCNN performances are higher than the classical counterparts. Moreover, investigation of various quantum circuits shows that the ones exploiting quantum entanglement achieve the best classification scores. This study underlines the potentialities of applying quantum computing to an EO case study and provides the theoretical and experimental background for futures investigations.
Optical remote sensing imagery has been widely used in many fields due to its high resolution and stable geometric properties. However, remote sensing imagery is inevitably affected by climate, especially clouds. Removing the cloud in the high-resolution remote sensing satellite image is an indispensable pre-processing step before analyzing it. For the sake of large-scale training data, neural networks have been successful in many image processing tasks, but the use of neural networks to remove cloud in remote sensing imagery is still relatively small. We adopt generative adversarial network t…
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…
The potential of using remote sensing imagery for environmental modelling and for providing real time support to humanitarian operations such as hurricane relief efforts is well established. These applications are substantially affected by missing data due to non-structural noise such as clouds, shadows and other atmospheric effects. In this work we probe the potential of applying a cycle-consistent latent variable deep generative model (DGM) for denoising cloudy Sentinel-2 observations conditioned on the information in cloud penetrating bands. We adapt the recently proposed Fréchet Distance m…
Intelligence and Space Research Division（情报与空间研究部）；Descartes Labs, Inc.（笛卡尔实验室公司）；Los Alamos National Laboratory（洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室）
This paper introduces a new method of generating realistic pervasive changes in the context of evaluating the effectiveness of change detection algorithms in controlled settings. The method, a cycle-consistent adversarial network (CycleGAN), requires low quantities of training data to generate realistic changes. Here we show an application of CycleGAN in creating realistic snow-covered scenes of multispectral Sentinel-2 imagery, and demonstrate how these images can be used as a test bed for anomalous change detection algorithms.
In this paper a new method of image smoothing for satellite imagery and its applications in environmental remote sensing are presented. This method is based on the global gradient minimization over the whole image. With respect to the image discrete identity, the continuous minimization problem is discretized. Using the finite difference numerical method of differentiation, a simple yet efficient 5*5-pixel template is derived. Convolution of the derived template with the image in different bands results in the discrimination of various image elements. This method is extremely fast, besides bei…
Remote Sensing Imagery for Flood Detection: Exploration of Augmentation Strategies
Image Processing Department, Fraunhofer ITWM（弗劳恩霍夫ITWM图像处理部门）；Algorithms for Computer Vision, Imaging and Data Analysis Group, Hochschule Darmstadt（计算机视觉算法、成像与数据分析小组，达姆施塔特应用技术大学）
Los Alamos National Laboratory（洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室）；Descartes Labs, Inc（笛卡尔实验室公司）
In this work we demonstrate that generative adversarial networks (GANs) can be used to generate realistic pervasive changes in remote sensing imagery, even in an unpaired training setting. We investigate some transformation quality metrics based on deep embedding of the generated and real images which enable visualization and understanding of the training dynamics of the GAN, and may provide a useful measure in terms of quantifying how distinguishable the generated images are from real images. We also identify some artifacts introduced by the GAN in the generated images, which are likely to co…
Estimating forest carbon stocks from high-resolution remote sensing imagery by reducing domain shift with style transfer
School of Geography and Remote Sensing, Guangzhou University（广州大学地理与遥感学院）；Innovation Center for Remote Sensing Big Data Intelligent Applications, Guangzhou University（广州大学遥感大数据智能应用创新中心）
Beijing University of Chemical Technology（北京化工大学）；Sugon Information Industry Co., Ltd（曙光信息产业有限公司）
The land cover classification has played an important role in remote sensing because it can intelligently identify things in one huge remote sensing image to reduce the work of humans. However, a lot of classification methods are designed based on the pixel feature or limited spatial feature of the remote sensing image, which limits the classification accuracy and universality of their methods. This paper proposed a novel method to take into the information of remote sensing image, i.e., geographic latitude-longitude information. In addition, a dual-branch convolutional neural network (CNN) cl…
School of Aerospace Engineering, Tsinghua University（清华大学航天航空学院）
Cross-modality fusing complementary information of multispectral remote sensing image pairs can improve the perception ability of detection algorithms, making them more robust and reliable for a wider range of applications, such as nighttime detection. Compared with prior methods, we think different features should be processed specifically, the modality-specific features should be retained and enhanced, while the modality-shared features should be cherry-picked from the RGB and thermal IR modalities. Following this idea, a novel and lightweight multispectral feature fusion approach with joint…
University of Shanghai for Science and Technology（上海理工大学）；Indiana University Bloomington（印第安纳大学伯明顿分校）；Tianjin University（天津大学）；Suffolk University（萨福克大学）
Vegetation is the natural linkage connecting soil, atmosphere and water. It can represent the change of land cover to a certain extent and serve as an indicator for global change research. Methods for measuring coverage can be divided into two types: surface measurement and remote sensing. Because vegetation cover has significant spatial and temporal differentiation characteristics, remote sensing has become an important technical means to estimate vegetation coverage. This paper firstly uses U-net to perform remote sensing image semantic segmentation training, then uses the result of semantic…
With the acceleration of the urban expansion, urban change detection (UCD), as a significant and effective approach, can provide the change information with respect to geospatial objects for dynamical urban analysis. However, existing datasets suffer from three bottlenecks: (1) lack of high spatial resolution images; (2) lack of semantic annotation; (3) lack of long-range multi-temporal images. In this paper, we propose a large scale benchmark dataset, termed Hi-UCD. This dataset uses aerial images with a spatial resolution of 0.1 m provided by the Estonia Land Board, including three-time phas…
Geospatial object segmentation, as a particular semantic segmentation task, always faces with larger-scale variation, larger intra-class variance of background, and foreground-background imbalance in the high spatial resolution (HSR) remote sensing imagery. However, general semantic segmentation methods mainly focus on scale variation in the natural scene, with inadequate consideration of the other two problems that usually happen in the large area earth observation scene. In this paper, we argue that the problems lie on the lack of foreground modeling and propose a foreground-aware relation n…
Cloud and cloud shadow segmentation are fundamental processes in optical remote sensing image analysis. Current methods for cloud/shadow identification in geospatial imagery are not as accurate as they should, especially in the presence of snow and haze. This paper presents a deep learning-based framework for the detection of cloud/shadow in Landsat 8 images. Our method benefits from a convolutional neural network, Cloud-Net+ (a modification of our previously proposed Cloud-Net \cite{myigarss}) that is trained with a novel loss function (Filtered Jaccard Loss). The proposed loss function is mo…
Mineral identification using remote sensing technologies is becoming more dominant in this field since it saves time by demonstrating a more effective way for land resources survey. In such remote sensing technologies, hyperspectral remote sensing (HSRS) technology has increased gradually for its efficient manner. This technology is usually used from an airborne platform, i.e., satellite. Hence, satellite imagery remote sensing technology is now more capable of providing accuracy in mineral identification, and mapping. Hyperspectral satellite imagery can identify minerals more accurately compa…
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…
Miyun Reservoir has produced huge benefits in flood control, agricultural irrigation, power generation, aquaculture, tourism, and urban water supply. Accurately water mapping is of great significance to the ecological environment monitoring of the Miyun Reservoir and the management of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project. On the 60th anniversary of the completion of the Miyun Reservoir, we took the Miyun Reservoir as the study area and collected all the Landsat-5 and Landsat-8 remote sensing images from 1984 to 2020 for water mapping. Based on the spectral, topographical and temporal-spa…
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…
Recently, deep learning technology have been extensively used in the field of image recognition. However, its main application is the recognition and detection of ordinary pictures and common scenes. It is challenging to effectively and expediently analyze remote-sensing images obtained by the image acquisition systems on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which includes the identification of the target and calculation of its position. Aerial remote sensing images have different shooting angles and methods compared with ordinary pictures or images, which makes remote-sensing images play an irrep…
In this paper, a Multi-Scale Fully Convolutional Network (MSFCN) with multi-scale convolutional kernel is proposed to exploit discriminative representations from two-dimensional (2D) satellite images.
In this paper we discuss the potential and challenges regarding SAR-optical stereogrammetry for urban areas, using very-high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing imagery. Since we do this mainly from a geometrical point of view, we first analyze the height reconstruction accuracy to be expected for different stereogrammetric configurations. Then, we propose a strategy for simultaneous tie point matching and 3D reconstruction, which exploits an epipolar-like search window constraint. To drive the matching and ensure some robustness, we combine different established handcrafted similarity measures. F…
This paper aims at providing multi-source remote sensing images registered in geometric space for image fusion. Focusing on the characteristics and differences of multi-source remote sensing images, a feature-based registration algorithm is implemented. The key technologies include image scale-space for implementing multi-scale properties, Harris corner detection for keypoints extraction, and partial intensity invariant feature descriptor (PIIFD) for keypoints description. Eventually, a multi-scale Harris-PIIFD image registration algorithm framework is proposed. The experimental results of fou…
