Adapting vision-language models to remote sensing imagery remains challenging due to two key factors: limited semantic coverage in textual representations and insufficient adaptability of visual features. These issues are particularly significant in aerial scenes, which involve various visual appearances and fine-grained object distinctions. We propose AVION, a knowledge distillation framework tailored for remote sensing adaptation of vision-language models. The teacher module constructs semantically rich textual prototypes by collecting descriptions from a large language model and verifying validity using remote sensing image features. The student module integrates lightweight and learnable prompts into both vision and language encoders, guided by the teacher to align embeddings and their cross-modal relationships. Once trained, the student operates independently during inference. Experiments on six optical remote sensing benchmarks show that AVION improves few-shot classification and base-class accuracy without degrading generalization to novel categories. It also enhances mean recall for cross-modal retrieval, with minimal additional trainable parameters.
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
The performance of video saliency estimation techniques has achieved significant advances along with the rapid development of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, devices like cameras and drones may have limited computational capability and storage space so that the direct deployment of complex deep saliency models becomes infeasible. To address this problem, this paper proposes a dynamic saliency estimation approach for aerial videos via spatiotemporal knowledge distillation. In this approach, five components are involved, including two teachers, two students and the desired spatiot…
Deep convolutional neural network with increased number of parameters has achieved improved precision in task of object detection on natural images, where objects of interests are annotated with horizontal boundary boxes. On aerial images captured from the bird-view perspective, these improvements on model architecture and deeper convolutional layers can also boost the performance on oriented object detection task. However, it is hard to directly apply those state-of-the-art object detectors on the devices with limited computation resources, which necessitates lightweight models through model …
Austrian Institute of Technology（奥地利技术研究所）；HCM University of Technology（胡志明市理工大学）；University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学）；FPT Soft Company（FPT软件公司）；Singapore Institute of Technology（新加坡理工大学）
In this paper, we present a high-performance and light-weight deep learning model for Remote Sensing Image Classification (RSIC), the task of identifying the aerial scene of a remote sensing image. To this end, we first valuate various benchmark convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures: MobileNet V1/V2, ResNet 50/151V2, InceptionV3/InceptionResNetV2, EfficientNet B0/B7, DenseNet 121/201, ConNeXt Tiny/Large. Then, the best performing models are selected to train a compact model in a teacher-student arrangement. The knowledge distillation from the teacher aims to achieve high performance…
Optical aerial images change detection is an important task in earth observation and has been extensively investigated in the past few decades. Generally, the supervised change detection methods with superior performance require a large amount of labeled training data which is obtained by manual annotation with high cost. In this paper, we present a novel unsupervised self-training algorithm (USTA) for optical aerial images change detection. The traditional method such as change vector analysis is used to generate the pseudo labels. We use these pseudo labels to train a well designed convoluti…
Learning Occlusion-Robust Vision Transformers for Real-Time UAV Tracking
College of Computer Science and Engineering, Guilin University of Technology（桂林理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学技术学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学人工智能学院）
Infrared UAV Target Tracking with Dynamic Feature Refinement and Global Contextual Attention Knowledge Distillation
School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Xi’an Modern Control Technology Research Institute（西安现代控制技术研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学人工智能与自动化学院）
Learning an Adaptive and View-Invariant Vision Transformer for Real-Time UAV Tracking
College of Computer Science and Engineering, Guilin University of Technology（桂林理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Guangxi Key Laboratory of Embedded Technology and Intelligent Information Processing（广西嵌入式技术与智能信息处理重点实验室）；School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学人工智能学院）；College of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机科学学院）
Recently, the availability of remote sensing imagery from aerial vehicles and satellites constantly improved. For an automated interpretation of such data, deep-learning-based object detectors achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, established object detectors require complete, precise, and correct bounding box annotations for training. In order to create the necessary training annotations for object detectors, imagery can be georeferenced and combined with data from other sources, such as points of interest localized by GPS sensors. Unfortunately, this combination often leads to poor …
