Object detection in aerial images has always been a challenging task due to the generally small size of the objects. Most current detectors prioritize the development of new detection frameworks, often overlooking research on fundamental components such as feature pyramid networks. In this paper, we introduce the Cross-Layer Feature Pyramid Transformer (CFPT), a novel upsampler-free feature pyramid network designed specifically for small object detection in aerial images. CFPT incorporates two meticulously designed attention blocks with linear computational complexity: Cross-Layer Channel-Wise Attention (CCA) and Cross-Layer Spatial-Wise Attention (CSA). CCA achieves cross-layer interaction by dividing channel-wise token groups to perceive cross-layer global information along the spatial dimension, while CSA enables cross-layer interaction by dividing spatial-wise token groups to perceive cross-layer global information along the channel dimension. By integrating these modules, CFPT enables efficient cross-layer interaction in a single step, thereby avoiding the semantic gap and information loss associated with element-wise summation and layer-by-layer transmission. In addition, CFPT incorporates global contextual information, which improves detection performance for small objects. To further enhance location awareness during cross-layer interaction, we propose the Cross-Layer Consistent Relative Positional Encoding (CCPE) based on inter-layer mutual receptive fields. We evaluate the effectiveness of CFPT on three challenging object detection datasets in aerial images: VisDrone2019-DET, TinyPerson, and xView. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CFPT outperforms state-of-the-art feature pyramid networks while incurring lower computational costs. The code is available at https://github.com/duzw9311/CFPT.
Building extraction from aerial images has several applications in problems such as urban planning, change detection, and disaster management. With the increasing availability of data, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for semantic segmentation of remote sensing imagery has improved significantly in recent years. However, convolutions operate in local neighborhoods and fail to capture non-local features that are essential in semantic understanding of aerial images. In this work, we propose to improve building segmentation of different sizes by capturing long-range dependencies using context…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
This paper proposes a Rotation-equivariant Attention Feature Fusion Pyramid Networks for Aerial Object Detection named ReAFFPN. ReAFFPN aims at improving the effect of rotation-equivariant features fusion between adjacent layers which suffers from the semantic and scale discontinuity. Due to the particularity of rotational equivariant convolution, general methods are unable to achieve their original effect while ensuring rotation equivariance of the network. To solve this problem, we design a new Rotation-equivariant Channel Attention which has the ability to both generate channel attention an…
Small Object Detection Model with Spatial Laplacian Pyramid Attention and Multi-Scale Features Enhancement in Aerial Images
Key Laboratory of Computational Intelligence and Chinese Information Processing of Ministry of Education, School of Computer and Information Technology, Shanxi University（教育部计算智能与中文信息处理重点实验室，计算机与信息技术学院，山西大学）
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 …
Tamkang University（淡江大学）；National Cheng Kung University（台湾成功大学）
With the achievements of Transformer in the field of natural language processing, the encoder-decoder and the attention mechanism in Transformer have been applied to computer vision. Recently, in multiple tasks of computer vision (image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, etc.), state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks have introduced some concepts of Transformer. This proves that Transformer has a good prospect in the field of image recognition. After Vision Transformer was proposed, more and more works began to use self-attention to completely replace the convoluti…
Nankai University（南开大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）；Alibaba DAMO Academy（阿里巴巴达摩院）
Recently, the vision transformer has achieved great success by pushing the state-of-the-art of various vision tasks. One of the most challenging problems in the vision transformer is that the large sequence length of image tokens leads to high computational cost (quadratic complexity). A popular solution to this problem is to use a single pooling operation to reduce the sequence length. This paper considers how to improve existing vision transformers, where the pooled feature extracted by a single pooling operation seems less powerful. To this end, we note that pyramid pooling has been demonst…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Damo Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）
Feature interactions across space and scales underpin modern visual recognition systems because they introduce beneficial visual contexts. Conventionally, spatial contexts are passively hidden in the CNN's increasing receptive fields or actively encoded by non-local convolution. Yet, the non-local spatial interactions are not across scales, and thus they fail to capture the non-local contexts of objects (or parts) residing in different scales. To this end, we propose a fully active feature interaction across both space and scales, called Feature Pyramid Transformer (FPT). It transforms any fea…
Deep neural networks have been a prevailing technique in the field of medical image processing. However, the most popular convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based methods for medical image segmentation are imperfect because they model long-range dependencies by stacking layers or enlarging filters. Transformers and the self-attention mechanism are recently proposed to effectively learn long-range dependencies by modeling all pairs of word-to-word attention regardless of their positions. The idea has also been extended to the computer vision field by creating and treating image patches as emb…
Sichuan Changhong Electric Co., Ltd.（四川长虹电器股份有限公司）；UESTC（电子科技大学）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）；G42（G42公司）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；CCST, NUAA（南京航空航天大学计算机科学与技术学院）；MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Vision transformers have recently shown strong global context modeling capabilities in camouflaged object detection. However, they suffer from two major limitations: less effective locality modeling and insufficient feature aggregation in decoders, which are not conducive to camouflaged object detection that explores subtle cues from indistinguishable backgrounds. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel transformer-based Feature Shrinkage Pyramid Network (FSPNet), which aims to hierarchically decode locality-enhanced neighboring transformer features through progressive shrin…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；GIPSA-lab, Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学、法国国家科学研究中心、格勒诺布尔国立理工学院联合GIPSA实验室）；University of Iceland（冰岛大学）；University of Leicester（莱斯特大学）
Detection of objects is extremely important in various aerial vision-based applications. Over the last few years, the methods based on convolution neural networks have made substantial progress. However, because of the large variety of object scales, densities, and arbitrary orientations, the current detectors struggle with the extraction of semantically strong features for small-scale objects by a predefined convolution kernel. To address this problem, we propose the rotation equivariant feature image pyramid network (REFIPN), an image pyramid network based on rotation equivariance convolutio…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Amazon Web Services（亚马逊云科技）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
Semantic segmentation is a challenging problem due to difficulties in modeling context in complex scenes and class confusions along boundaries. Most literature either focuses on context modeling or boundary refinement, which is less generalizable in open-world scenarios. In this work, we advocate a unified framework(UN-EPT) to segment objects by considering both context information and boundary artifacts. We first adapt a sparse sampling strategy to incorporate the transformer-based attention mechanism for efficient context modeling. In addition, a separate spatial branch is introduced to capt…
Nanjing University（南京大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；IIAI（智能信息处理与应用研究院）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
Although using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as backbones achieves great successes in computer vision, this work investigates a simple backbone network useful for many dense prediction tasks without convolutions. Unlike the recently-proposed Transformer model (e.g., ViT) that is specially designed for image classification, we propose Pyramid Vision Transformer~(PVT), which overcomes the difficulties of porting Transformer to various dense prediction tasks. PVT has several merits compared to prior arts. (1) Different from ViT that typically has low-resolution outputs and high computation…
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；Shenzhen Technology University（深圳技术大学）
Semantic segmentation usually benefits from global contexts, fine localisation information, multi-scale features, etc. To advance Transformer-based segmenters with these aspects, we present a simple yet powerful semantic segmentation architecture, termed as IncepFormer. IncepFormer has two critical contributions as following. First, it introduces a novel pyramid structured Transformer encoder which harvests global context and fine localisation features simultaneously. These features are concatenated and fed into a convolution layer for final per-pixel prediction. Second, IncepFormer integrates…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Tencent PCG（腾讯平台与内容事业群）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Although vision transformers (ViTs) have achieved great success in computer vision, the heavy computational cost hampers their applications to dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation on mobile devices. In this paper, we present a mobile-friendly architecture named \textbf{To}ken \textbf{P}yramid Vision Trans\textbf{former} (\textbf{TopFormer}). The proposed \textbf{TopFormer} takes Tokens from various scales as input to produce scale-aware semantic features, which are then injected into the corresponding tokens to augment the representation. Experimental results demonstrate that o…
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）
P2AT: Pyramid Pooling Axial Transformer for Real-time Semantic Segmentation
School of Computer Science, Zhejiang Normal University（浙江师范大学计算机科学学院）；School of Mathematical Medicine, Zhejiang Normal University（浙江师范大学数学医学院）；Zhejiang Institute of Photoelectronics & Zhejiang Institute for Advanced Light Source, Zhejiang Normal University（浙江师范大学光电研究所与浙江先进光源研究所）；School of Communications and Information Engineering, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学通信与信息工程学院）
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 ro…
Object detection in aerial images is an active yet challenging task in computer vision because of the birdview perspective, the highly complex backgrounds, and the variant appearances of objects. Especially when detecting densely packed objects in aerial images, methods relying on horizontal proposals for common object detection often introduce mismatches between the Region of Interests (RoIs) and objects. This leads to the common misalignment between the final object classification confidence and localization accuracy. Although rotated anchors have been used to tackle this problem, the design…
The past few years have seen an increased interest in aerial image object detection due to its critical value to large-scale geo-scientific research like environmental studies, urban planning, and intelligence monitoring. However, the task is very challenging due to the birds-eye view perspective, complex backgrounds, large and various image sizes, different appearances of objects, and the scarcity of well-annotated datasets. Recent advances in computer vision have shown promise tackling the challenge. Specifically, Vision Transformer Detector (ViTDet) was proposed to extract multi-scale featu…
Chengdu Institute of Computer Applications, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院成都计算机应用研究所）；Nanchang Institute of Technology（南昌工程学院）；Zenseact；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
As one of the prevalent components, Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) is widely used in current object detection models for improving multi-scale object detection performance. However, its feature fusion mode is still in a misaligned and local manner, thus limiting the representation power. To address the inherit defects of FPN, a novel architecture termed Content-Augmented Feature Pyramid Network (CA-FPN) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a Global Content Extraction Module (GCEM) is proposed to extract multi-scale context information. Secondly, lightweight linear spatial Transformer connections…
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely utilized in many computer vision tasks. However, CNNs have a fixed reception field and lack the ability of long-range perception, which is crucial to human pose estimation. Due to its capability to capture long-range dependencies between pixels, transformer architecture has been adopted to computer vision applications recently and is proven to be a highly effective architecture. We are interested in exploring its capability in human pose estimation, and thus propose a novel model based on transformer architecture, enhanced with a feature py…
Institute of Deep Learning, Baidu Research（百度研究院深度学习研究所）；National Engineering Laboratory for Deep Learning Technology and Application（深度学习技术及应用国家工程实验室）；School of Software, XinJiang University（新疆大学软件学院）
Transformers have shown impressive performance in various natural language processing and computer vision tasks, due to the capability of modeling long-range dependencies. Recent progress has demonstrated that combining such Transformers with CNN-based semantic image segmentation models is very promising. However, it is not well studied yet on how well a pure Transformer based approach can achieve for image segmentation. In this work, we explore a novel framework for semantic image segmentation, which is encoder-decoder based Fully Transformer Networks (FTN). Specifically, we first propose a P…
Low-Rank Continual Pyramid Vision Transformer: Incrementally Segment Whole-Body Organs in CT with Light-Weighted Adaptation
DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴达摩院）；State University of New York at Stony Brook（纽约州立大学石溪分校）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；The First Affiliated Hospital Zhejiang University（浙江大学医学院附属第一医院）
Sejong University（世宗大学）；Abdul Wali Khan University（阿卜杜勒·瓦利·汗大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Data61-CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61研究所）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；University of Canberra（堪培拉大学）
Salient object detection (SOD) extracts meaningful contents from an input image. RGB-based SOD methods lack the complementary depth clues; hence, providing limited performance for complex scenarios. Similarly, RGB-D models process RGB and depth inputs, but the depth data availability during testing may hinder the model's practical applicability. This paper exploits only RGB images, estimates depth from RGB, and leverages the intermediate depth features. We employ a pyramidal attention structure to extract multi-level convolutional-transformer features to process initial stage representations a…
Benchmarking Deep Learning Models for Aerial LiDAR Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation under Real Acquisition Conditions: A Case Study in Navarre
Department of Statistics, Computer Science and Mathematics and Institute of Smart Cities (ISC), Public University of Navarre (UPNA)（统计、计算机科学与数学系和智能城市研究所（ISC），纳瓦拉公共大学（UPNA））；Tracasa Instrumental
Recent salient object detection (SOD) methods based on deep neural network have achieved remarkable performance. However, most of existing SOD models designed for low-resolution input perform poorly on high-resolution images due to the contradiction between the sampling depth and the receptive field size. Aiming at resolving this contradiction, we propose a novel one-stage framework called Pyramid Grafting Network (PGNet), using transformer and CNN backbone to extract features from different resolution images independently and then graft the features from transformer branch to CNN branch. An a…
LOANet: A Lightweight Network Using Object Attention for Extracting Buildings and Roads from UAV Aerial Remote Sensing Images
School of Medical Instruments, Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences（上海健康医学院医疗器械学院）；School of Health Sciences and Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology（上海理工大学健康科学与工程学院）；Shanghai Children’s Medical Center, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学医学院附属上海儿童医学中心）；School of Communication & Electronic Engineering, East China Normal University（华东师范大学通信与电子工程学院）；Institute of Seismology, China Earthquake Administration（中国地震局地震研究所）
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…
VPNeXt -- Rethinking Dense Decoding for Plain Vision Transformer
School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（信息与软件工程学院，电子科学与技术大学）；Shenzhen Institute for Advanced Study, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（深圳先进研究所，电子科学与技术大学）
DUFormer: Solving Power Line Detection Task in Aerial Images using Semantic Segmentation
Autel Robotics（道通智能）；Fujian College, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学福建学院）；Quanzhou Institute of Equipment Manufacturing, Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院福建物质结构研究所泉州装备制造研究所）；Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University（福建农林大学）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）
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…
University of New Orleans（新奥尔良大学）；US Army Corps of Engineers（美国陆军工程兵团）
Imbalanced datasets are a significant challenge in real-world scenarios. They lead to models that underperform on underrepresented classes, which is a critical issue in infrastructure inspection. This paper introduces the Enhanced Feature Pyramid Network (E-FPN), a deep learning model for the semantic segmentation of culverts and sewer pipes within imbalanced datasets. The E-FPN incorporates architectural innovations like sparsely connected blocks and depth-wise separable convolutions to improve feature extraction and handle object variations. To address dataset imbalance, the model employs st…
Transformer networks have achieved great progress for computer vision tasks. Transformer-in-Transformer (TNT) architecture utilizes inner transformer and outer transformer to extract both local and global representations. In this work, we present new TNT baselines by introducing two advanced designs: 1) pyramid architecture, and 2) convolutional stem. The new "PyramidTNT" significantly improves the original TNT by establishing hierarchical representations. PyramidTNT achieves better performances than the previous state-of-the-art vision transformers such as Swin Transformer. We hope this new b…
Recently, change detection (CD) of remote sensing images have achieved great progress with the advances of deep learning. However, current methods generally deliver incomplete CD regions and irregular CD boundaries due to the limited representation ability of the extracted visual features. To relieve these issues, in this work we propose a novel learning framework named Fully Transformer Network (FTN) for remote sensing image CD, which improves the feature extraction from a global view and combines multi-level visual features in a pyramid manner. More specifically, the proposed framework first…
