In deep learning research, self-supervised learning (SSL) has received great attention triggering interest within both the computer vision and remote sensing communities. While there has been a big success in computer vision, most of the potential of SSL in the domain of earth observation remains locked. In this paper, we provide an introduction to, and a review of the concepts and latest developments in SSL for computer vision in the context of remote sensing. Further, we provide a preliminary benchmark of modern SSL algorithms on popular remote sensing datasets, verifying the potential of SSL in remote sensing and providing an extended study on data augmentations. Finally, we identify a list of promising directions of future research in SSL for earth observation (SSL4EO) to pave the way for fruitful interaction of both domains.
Given the importance of remote sensing, surprisingly little attention has been paid to it by the representation learning community. To address it and to establish baselines and a common evaluation protocol in this domain, we provide simplified access to 5 diverse remote sensing datasets in a standardized form. Specifically, we investigate in-domain representation learning to develop generic remote sensing representations and explore which characteristics are important for a dataset to be a good source for remote sensing representation learning. The established baselines achieve state-of-the-ar…
Entropy is the measure of uncertainty in any data and is adopted for maximisation of mutual information in many remote sensing operations. The availability of wide entropy variations motivated us for an investigation over the suitability preference of these versions to specific operations.
RS3DBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for 3D Spatial Perception in Remote Sensing
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Software College of Zhejiang University（浙江大学软件学院）；Hangzhou City University（杭州市大学）
Institute of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence（人工智能高等研究院）；Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf（亥姆霍兹德累斯顿罗森多夫研究中心）；Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology（亥姆霍兹弗赖贝格资源技术研究所）
Deep neural networks have achieved great success in many important remote sensing tasks. Nevertheless, their vulnerability to adversarial examples should not be neglected. In this study, we systematically analyze the universal adversarial examples in remote sensing data for the first time, without any knowledge from the victim model. Specifically, we propose a novel black-box adversarial attack method, namely Mixup-Attack, and its simple variant Mixcut-Attack, for remote sensing data. The key idea of the proposed methods is to find common vulnerabilities among different networks by attacking t…
Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering (CSRE), Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校资源工程研究中心）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）
Conventional existing retrieval methods in remote sensing (RS) are often based on a uni-modal data retrieval framework. In this work, we propose a novel inter-modal triplet-based zero-shot retrieval scheme utilizing a sketch-based representation of RS data. The proposed scheme performs efficiently even when the sketch representations are marginally prototypical of the image. We conducted experiments on a new bi-modal image-sketch dataset called Earth on Canvas (EoC) conceived during this study. We perform a thorough bench-marking of this dataset and demonstrate that the proposed network outper…
Novel view synthesis of remote sensing scenes is of great significance for scene visualization, human-computer interaction, and various downstream applications. Despite the recent advances in computer graphics and photogrammetry technology, generating novel views is still challenging particularly for remote sensing images due to its high complexity, view sparsity and limited view-perspective variations. In this paper, we propose a novel remote sensing view synthesis method by leveraging the recent advances in implicit neural representations. Considering the overhead and far depth imaging of re…
Central South University（中南大学）；Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院合肥物质科学研究院）
Remote sensing image scene classification is a fundamental but challenging task in understanding remote sensing images. Recently, deep learning-based methods, especially convolutional neural network-based (CNN-based) methods have shown enormous potential to understand remote sensing images. CNN-based methods meet with success by utilizing features learned from data rather than features designed manually. The feature-learning procedure of CNN largely depends on the architecture of CNN. However, most of the architectures of CNN used for remote sensing scene classification are still designed by h…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Leshan Normal University（乐山师范学院）
In this work, a discriminatively learned CNN embedding is proposed for remote sensing image scene classification. Our proposed siamese network simultaneously computes the classification loss function and the metric learning loss function of the two input images. Specifically, for the classification loss, we use the standard cross-entropy loss function to predict the classes of the images. For the metric learning loss, our siamese network learns to map the intra-class and inter-class input pairs to a feature space where intra-class inputs are close and inter-class inputs are separated by a marg…
MGIMM: Multi-Granularity Instruction Multimodal Model for Attribute-Guided Remote Sensing Image Detailed Description
National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software（国家多媒体软件工程技术研究中心）；School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；Hubei Luojia Laboratory（湖北珞珈实验室）
Changes to Captions: An Attentive Network for Remote Sensing Change Captioning
Institute of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence（人工智能高级研究院）；Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR)（亥姆霍兹德累斯顿罗森多夫研究中心）；Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology (HIF)（亥姆霍兹弗赖贝格资源技术研究所）
Munich University of Applied Sciences（慕尼黑应用科学大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Image classification is one of the main drivers of the rapid developments in deep learning with convolutional neural networks for computer vision. So is the analogous task of scene classification in remote sensing. However, in contrast to the computer vision community that has long been using well-established, large-scale standard datasets to train and benchmark high-capacity models, the remote sensing community still largely relies on relatively small and often application-dependend datasets, thus lacking comparability. With this letter, we present a classification-oriented conversion of the …
Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院西安光学精密机械研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Remote sensing scene classification aims to assign a specific semantic label to a remote sensing image. Recently, convolutional neural networks have greatly improved the performance of remote sensing scene classification. However, some confused images may be easily recognized as the incorrect category, which generally degrade the performance. The differences between image pairs can be used to distinguish image categories. This paper proposed a pairwise comparison network, which contains two main steps: pairwise selection and pairwise representation. The proposed network first selects similar i…
University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；University of Twente（特文特大学）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）
The success of supervised classification of remotely sensed images acquired over large geographical areas or at short time intervals strongly depends on the representativity of the samples used to train the classification algorithm and to define the model. When training samples are collected from an image (or a spatial region) different from the one used for mapping, spectral shifts between the two distributions are likely to make the model fail. Such shifts are generally due to differences in acquisition and atmospheric conditions or to changes in the nature of the object observed. In order t…
Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院西安光机精密机械研究所）；The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Inspired by recent development of artificial satellite, remote sensing images have attracted extensive attention. Recently, noticeable progress has been made in scene classification and target detection.However, it is still not clear how to describe the remote sensing image content with accurate and concise sentences. In this paper, we investigate to describe the remote sensing images with accurate and flexible sentences. First, some annotated instructions are presented to better describe the remote sensing images considering the special characteristics of remote sensing images. Second, in ord…
The past few decades have witnessed the great progress of unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs) in civilian fields, especially in photogrammetry and remote sensing. In contrast with the platforms of manned aircraft and satellite, the UAV platform holds many promising characteristics: flexibility, efficiency, high-spatial/temporal resolution, low cost, easy operation, etc., which make it an effective complement to other remote-sensing platforms and a cost-effective means for remote sensing. Considering the popularity and expansion of UAV-based remote sensing in recent years, this paper provides a s…
Several remote sensing software packages are used to the explicit purpose of analyzing and visualizing remotely sensed data, with the developing of remote sensing sensor technologies from last ten years. Accord-ing to literature, the remote sensing is still the lack of software tools for effective information extraction from remote sensing data. So, this paper provides a state-of-art of multi-sensor image fusion technologies as well as review on the quality evaluation of the single image or fused images in the commercial remote sensing pack-ages. It also introduces program (ALwassaiProcess) de…
Research & Development Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University in Shenzhen（西北工业大学深圳研究院）；School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学自动化学院）；School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）
Remote sensing image scene classification, which aims at labeling remote sensing images with a set of semantic categories based on their contents, has broad applications in a range of fields. Propelled by the powerful feature learning capabilities of deep neural networks, remote sensing image scene classification driven by deep learning has drawn remarkable attention and achieved significant breakthroughs. However, to the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive review of recent achievements regarding deep learning for scene classification of remote sensing images is still lacking. Considering t…
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）
MBZ University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Deep learning-based algorithms have seen a massive popularity in different areas of remote sensing image analysis over the past decade. Recently, transformers-based architectures, originally introduced in natural language processing, have pervaded computer vision field where the self-attention mechanism has been utilized as a replacement to the popular convolution operator for capturing long-range dependencies. Inspired by recent advances in computer vision, remote sensing community has also witnessed an increased exploration of vision transformers for a diverse set of tasks. Although a number…
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…
Remote sensing images and techniques are powerful tools to investigate earth surface. Data quality is the key to enhance remote sensing applications and obtaining a clear and noise-free set of data is very difficult in most situations due to the varying acquisition (e.g., atmosphere and season), sensor, and platform (e.g., satellite angles and sensor characteristics) conditions. With the increasing development of satellites, nowadays Terabytes of remote sensing images can be acquired every day. Therefore, information and data fusion can be particularly important in the remote sensing community…
Element AI；Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）
Remote sensing and automatic earth monitoring are key to solve global-scale challenges such as disaster prevention, land use monitoring, or tackling climate change. Although there exist vast amounts of remote sensing data, most of it remains unlabeled and thus inaccessible for supervised learning algorithms. Transfer learning approaches can reduce the data requirements of deep learning algorithms. However, most of these methods are pre-trained on ImageNet and their generalization to remote sensing imagery is not guaranteed due to the domain gap. In this work, we propose Seasonal Contrast (SeCo…
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…
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…
Deep learning techniques are becoming increasingly important to solve a number of image processing tasks. Among common algorithms, Convolutional Neural Networks and Recurrent Neural Networks based systems achieve state of the art results on satellite and aerial imagery in many applications. While these approaches are subject to scientific interest, there is currently no operational and generic implementation available at user-level for the remote sensing community. In this paper, we presents a framework enabling the use of deep learning techniques with remote sensing images and geospatial data…
We explore the use of convolutional neural networks for the semantic classification of remote sensing scenes. Two recently proposed architectures, CaffeNet and GoogLeNet, are adopted, with three different learning modalities. Besides conventional training from scratch, we resort to pre-trained networks that are only fine-tuned on the target data, so as to avoid overfitting problems and reduce design time. Experiments on two remote sensing datasets, with markedly different characteristics, testify on the effectiveness and wide applicability of the proposed solution, which guarantees a significa…
In recent years self-supervised learning has emerged as a promising candidate for unsupervised representation learning. In the visual domain its applications are mostly studied in the context of images of natural scenes. However, its applicability is especially interesting in specific areas, like remote sensing and medicine, where it is hard to obtain huge amounts of labeled data. In this work, we conduct an extensive analysis of the applicability of self-supervised learning in remote sensing image classification. We analyze the influence of the number and domain of images used for self-superv…
Deep learning models for image classification are typically trained under the "closed-world" assumption with a predefined set of image classes. However, when the models are deployed they may be faced with input images not belonging to the classes encountered during training. This type of scenario is common in remote sensing image classification where images come from different geographic areas, sensors, and imaging conditions. In this paper we deal with the problem of detecting remote sensing images coming from a different distribution compared to the training data - out of distribution images…
Entropy is the measure of uncertainty in any data and is adopted for maximisation of mutual information in many remote sensing operations. The availability of wide entropy variations motivated us for an investigation over the suitability preference of these versions to specific operations. Methodologies were implemented in Matlab and were enhanced with entropy variations. Evaluation of various implementations was based on different statistical parameters with reference to the study area The popular available versions like Tsalli's, Shanon's, and Renyi's entropies were analysed in context of va…
Govt. Arts College, Melur（梅卢尔政府艺术学院）；Sri Meenakshi Govt. Arts College for Women, Madurai（马杜赖斯里米纳克希政府女子艺术学院）
Remote sensing image classification can be performed in many different ways to extract meaningful features. One common approach is to perform edge detection. A second approach is to try and detect whole shapes, given the fact that these shapes usually tend to have distinctive properties such as object foreground or background. To get optimal results, these two approaches can be combined. This paper adopts a combinatorial optimization method to adaptively select threshold based features to improve remote sensing image. Feature selection is an important combinatorial optimization problem in the …
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）
Transferring the ImageNet pre-trained weights to the various remote sensing tasks has produced acceptable results and reduced the need for labeled samples. However, the domain differences between ground imageries and remote sensing images cause the performance of such transfer learning to be limited. Recent research has demonstrated that self-supervised learning methods capture visual features that are more discriminative and transferable than the supervised ImageNet weights. We are motivated by these facts to pre-train the in-domain representations of remote sensing imagery using contrastive …
Large Language Models for Captioning and Retrieving Remote Sensing Images
INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon（里斯本大学高等技术学院INESC-ID研究所）；Universidade NOVA de Lisboa（新里斯本大学）；Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
