In the context of Earth observation, the detection of changes is performed from multitemporal images acquired by sensors with possibly different spatial and/or spectral resolutions or even different modalities (e.g. optical, radar). Even limiting to the optical modality, this task has proved to be challenging as soon as the sensors have different spatial and/or spectral resolutions. This paper proposes a novel unsupervised change detection method dedicated to images acquired with such so-called heterogeneous optical sensors. This method capitalizes on recent advances which frame the change detection problem into a robust fusion framework. More precisely, we show that a deep adversarial network designed and trained beforehand to fuse a pair of multiband optical images can be easily complemented by a network with the same architecture to perform change detection. The resulting overall architecture itself follows an adversarial strategy where the fusion network and the additional network are interpreted as essential building blocks of a generator. A comparison with state-of-the-art change detection methods demonstrates the versatility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Multi-scale features are of great importance in encoding objects with scale variance in object detection tasks. A common strategy for multi-scale feature extraction is adopting the classic top-down and bottom-up feature pyramid networks. However, these approaches suffer from the loss or degradation of feature information, impairing the fusion effect of non-adjacent levels. This paper proposes an asymptotic feature pyramid network (AFPN) to support direct interaction at non-adjacent levels. AFPN is initiated by fusing two adjacent low-level features and asymptotically incorporates higher-level features into the fusion process. In this way, the larger semantic gap between non-adjacent levels can be avoided. Given the potential for multi-object information conflicts to arise during feature fusion at each spatial location, adaptive spatial fusion operation is further utilized to mitigate these inconsistencies. We incorporate the proposed AFPN into both two-stage and one-stage object detection frameworks and evaluate with the MS-COCO 2017 validation and test datasets. Experimental evaluation shows that our method achieves more competitive results than other state-of-the-art feature pyramid networks. The code is available at \href{//github.com/gyyang23/AFPN}{//github.com/gyyang23/AFPN}.
In this paper, we develop a novel super-resolution algorithm for near-field synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) under irregular scanning geometries. As fifth-generation (5G) millimeter-wave (mmWave) devices are becoming increasingly affordable and available, high-resolution SAR imaging is feasible for end-user applications and non-laboratory environments. Emerging applications such freehand imaging, wherein a handheld radar is scanned throughout space by a user, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imaging, and automotive SAR face several unique challenges for high-resolution imaging. First, recovering a SAR image requires knowledge of the array positions throughout the scan. While recent work has introduced camera-based positioning systems capable of adequately estimating the position, recovering the algorithm efficiently is a requirement to enable edge and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. Efficient algorithms for non-cooperative near-field SAR sampling have been explored in recent work, but suffer image defocusing under position estimation error and can only produce medium-fidelity images. In this paper, we introduce a mobile-friend vision transformer (ViT) architecture to address position estimation error and perform SAR image super-resolution (SR) under irregular sampling geometries. The proposed algorithm, Mobile-SRViT, is the first to employ a ViT approach for SAR image enhancement and is validated in simulation and via empirical studies.
Eddy detection is a critical task for ocean scientists to understand and analyze ocean circulation. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid eddy detection approach that combines sea surface height (SSH) and velocity fields with geometric criteria defining eddy behavior. Our approach searches for SSH minima and maxima, which oceanographers expect to find at the center of eddies. Geometric criteria are used to verify expected velocity field properties, such as net rotation and symmetry, by tracing velocity components along a circular path surrounding each eddy center. Progressive searches outward and into deeper layers yield each eddy's 3D region of influence. Isolation of each eddy structure from the dataset, using it's cylindrical footprint, facilitates visualization of internal eddy structures using horizontal velocity, vertical velocity, temperature and salinity. A quantitative comparison of Okubo-Weiss vorticity (OW) thresholding, the standard winding angle, and this new SSH-velocity hybrid methods of eddy detection as applied to the Red Sea dataset suggests that detection results are highly dependent on the choices of method, thresholds, and criteria. Our new SSH-velocity hybrid detection approach has the advantages of providing eddy structures with verified rotation properties, 3D visualization of the internal structure of physical properties, and rapid efficient estimations of eddy footprints without calculating streamlines. Our approach combines visualization of internal structure and tracking overall movement to support the study of the transport mechanisms key to understanding the interaction of nutrient distribution and ocean circulation. Our method is applied to three different datasets to showcase the generality of its application.
Recent advances in maximizing mutual information (MI) between the source and target have demonstrated its effectiveness in text generation. However, previous works paid little attention to modeling the backward network of MI (i.e., dependency from the target to the source), which is crucial to the tightness of the variational information maximization lower bound. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Mutual Information (AMI): a text generation framework which is formed as a novel saddle point (min-max) optimization aiming to identify joint interactions between the source and target. Within this framework, the forward and backward networks are able to iteratively promote or demote each other's generated instances by comparing the real and synthetic data distributions. We also develop a latent noise sampling strategy that leverages random variations at the high-level semantic space to enhance the long term dependency in the generation process. Extensive experiments based on different text generation tasks demonstrate that the proposed AMI framework can significantly outperform several strong baselines, and we also show that AMI has potential to lead to a tighter lower bound of maximum mutual information for the variational information maximization problem.
Substantial efforts have been devoted more recently to presenting various methods for object detection in optical remote sensing images. However, the current survey of datasets and deep learning based methods for object detection in optical remote sensing images is not adequate. Moreover, most of the existing datasets have some shortcomings, for example, the numbers of images and object categories are small scale, and the image diversity and variations are insufficient. These limitations greatly affect the development of deep learning based object detection methods. In the paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the recent deep learning based object detection progress in both the computer vision and earth observation communities. Then, we propose a large-scale, publicly available benchmark for object DetectIon in Optical Remote sensing images, which we name as DIOR. The dataset contains 23463 images and 192472 instances, covering 20 object classes. The proposed DIOR dataset 1) is large-scale on the object categories, on the object instance number, and on the total image number; 2) has a large range of object size variations, not only in terms of spatial resolutions, but also in the aspect of inter- and intra-class size variability across objects; 3) holds big variations as the images are obtained with different imaging conditions, weathers, seasons, and image quality; and 4) has high inter-class similarity and intra-class diversity. The proposed benchmark can help the researchers to develop and validate their data-driven methods. Finally, we evaluate several state-of-the-art approaches on our DIOR dataset to establish a baseline for future research.
Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with very limited convolutional parameters while keep accuracy. Secondly, we further propose reverse attention to guide such side-output residual learning in a top-down manner. By erasing the current predicted salient regions from side-output features, the network can eventually explore the missing object parts and details which results in high resolution and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods, and with advantages in terms of simplicity, efficiency (45 FPS) and model size (81 MB).
The prevalence of networked sensors and actuators in many real-world systems such as smart buildings, factories, power plants, and data centers generate substantial amounts of multivariate time series data for these systems. The rich sensor data can be continuously monitored for intrusion events through anomaly detection. However, conventional threshold-based anomaly detection methods are inadequate due to the dynamic complexities of these systems, while supervised machine learning methods are unable to exploit the large amounts of data due to the lack of labeled data. On the other hand, current unsupervised machine learning approaches have not fully exploited the spatial-temporal correlation and other dependencies amongst the multiple variables (sensors/actuators) in the system for detecting anomalies. In this work, we propose an unsupervised multivariate anomaly detection method based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Instead of treating each data stream independently, our proposed MAD-GAN framework considers the entire variable set concurrently to capture the latent interactions amongst the variables. We also fully exploit both the generator and discriminator produced by the GAN, using a novel anomaly score called DR-score to detect anomalies by discrimination and reconstruction. We have tested our proposed MAD-GAN using two recent datasets collected from real-world CPS: the Secure Water Treatment (SWaT) and the Water Distribution (WADI) datasets. Our experimental results showed that the proposed MAD-GAN is effective in reporting anomalies caused by various cyber-intrusions compared in these complex real-world systems.
We introduce an effective model to overcome the problem of mode collapse when training Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). Firstly, we propose a new generator objective that finds it better to tackle mode collapse. And, we apply an independent Autoencoders (AE) to constrain the generator and consider its reconstructed samples as "real" samples to slow down the convergence of discriminator that enables to reduce the gradient vanishing problem and stabilize the model. Secondly, from mappings between latent and data spaces provided by AE, we further regularize AE by the relative distance between the latent and data samples to explicitly prevent the generator falling into mode collapse setting. This idea comes when we find a new way to visualize the mode collapse on MNIST dataset. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to propose and apply successfully the relative distance of latent and data samples for stabilizing GAN. Thirdly, our proposed model, namely Generative Adversarial Autoencoder Networks (GAAN), is stable and has suffered from neither gradient vanishing nor mode collapse issues, as empirically demonstrated on synthetic, MNIST, MNIST-1K, CelebA and CIFAR-10 datasets. Experimental results show that our method can approximate well multi-modal distribution and achieve better results than state-of-the-art methods on these benchmark datasets. Our model implementation is published here: //github.com/tntrung/gaan
Object detection is an important and challenging problem in computer vision. Although the past decade has witnessed major advances in object detection in natural scenes, such successes have been slow to aerial imagery, not only because of the huge variation in the scale, orientation and shape of the object instances on the earth's surface, but also due to the scarcity of well-annotated datasets of objects in aerial scenes. To advance object detection research in Earth Vision, also known as Earth Observation and Remote Sensing, we introduce a large-scale Dataset for Object deTection in Aerial images (DOTA). To this end, we collect $2806$ aerial images from different sensors and platforms. Each image is of the size about 4000-by-4000 pixels and contains objects exhibiting a wide variety of scales, orientations, and shapes. These DOTA images are then annotated by experts in aerial image interpretation using $15$ common object categories. The fully annotated DOTA images contains $188,282$ instances, each of which is labeled by an arbitrary (8 d.o.f.) quadrilateral To build a baseline for object detection in Earth Vision, we evaluate state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on DOTA. Experiments demonstrate that DOTA well represents real Earth Vision applications and are quite challenging.
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 order to exhaustively exploit the contents of remote sensing images, a large-scale aerial image data set is constructed for remote sensing image caption. Finally, a comprehensive review is presented on the proposed data set to fully advance the task of remote sensing caption. Extensive experiments on the proposed data set demonstrate that the content of the remote sensing image can be completely described by generating language descriptions. The data set is available at //github.com/2051/RSICD_optimal