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Remote sensing image object detection is widely used in civil and military fields. The important task is to detect objects such as ships, planes, airports, harbours and so on, and then it can obtain object category and position information. It is of great significance to use remote sensing images to observe the densely arranged and directional targets such as cars and ships parked in parking lots and harbours. The object detection task mainly includes object localization and classification. Remote sensing images contain large number of small objects and dense scenes due to the long shooting distance and wide coverage. Small objects occupy few pixels in the image, and they are easily miss‐detected. In dense scenes, the overlapping part of each object is large, so it is easy to detect objects repeatedly. The traditional small object detection methods deliver low accuracy and take long time. Therefore, object detection is very challenging. We put forward a novel deep learning‐based single shot multibox detector (SSD) model for object detection. First, we propose an improved inception network to optimize SSD to strengthen the small object feature extraction ability (FEA) in the shallow network. Second, the feature pyramid network is modified to enhance the fusion effect. Third, the deep feature fusion module is designed to improve the FEA of the deep network. Finally, the extracted image features are matched with candidate boxes with different aspect ratios to perform object detection and location with different scales. Experiments on DOTA show that the proposed algorithm can adapt to the remote sensing object detection in different backgrounds, and effectively improve the detection effect of remote sensing objects in complex scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, with the rapid development of deep learning technology, great progress has been made in remote sensing scene image classification. Compared with natural images, remote sensing scene images are usually more complex, with high inter-class similarity and large intra-class differences, which makes it difficult for commonly used networks to effectively learn the features of remote sensing scene images. In addition, most existing methods adopt hard labels to supervise the network model, which makes the model prone to losing fine-grained information of ground objects. In order to solve these problems, a feature-augmented self-distilled convolutional neural network (FASDNet) is proposed. First, ResNet34 is adopted as the backbone network to extract multi-level features of images. Next, a feature augmentation pyramid module (FAPM) is designed to extract and fuse multi-level feature information. Then, auxiliary branches are constructed to provide additional supervision information. The self-distillation method is utilized between the feature augmentation pyramid module and the backbone network, as well as between the backbone network and auxiliary branches. Finally, the proposed model is jointly supervised using feature distillation loss, logits distillation loss, and cross-entropy loss. A lot of experiments are conducted on four widely used remote sensing scene image datasets, and the experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to some state-ot-the-art classification methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the arrival of new data acquisition platforms derived from the Internet of Things (IoT), this paper goes beyond the understanding of traditional remote sensing technologies. Deep fusion of remote sensing and computer vision has hit the industrial world and makes it possible to apply Artificial intelligence to solve problems such as automatic extraction of information and image interpretation. However, due to the complex architecture of IoT and the lack of a unified security protection mechanism, devices in remote sensing are vulnerable to privacy leaks when sharing data. It is necessary to design a security scheme suitable for computation‐limited devices in IoT, since traditional encryption methods are based on computational complexity. Visual Cryptography (VC) is a threshold scheme for images that can be decoded directly by the human visual system when superimposing encrypted images. The stacking‐to‐see feature and simple Boolean decryption operation make VC an ideal solution for privacy‐preserving recognition for large‐scale remote sensing images in IoT. In this study, the secure and efficient transmission of high‐resolution remote sensing images by meaningful VC is achieved. By diffusing the error between the encryption block and the original block to adjacent blocks, the degradation of quality in recovery images is mitigated. By fine‐tuning the pre‐trained model from large‐scale datasets, we improve the recognition performance of small encryption datasets for remote sensing images. The experimental results show that the proposed lightweight privacy‐preserving recognition framework maintains high recognition performance while enhancing security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike natural images, remote sensing scene images usually contain one scene label and many object labels, and many object labels are arranged dispersedly, which brings great difficulties to feature extraction of scene label. To accurately identify scene labels from remote sensing scene images with multiple object labels, it is important to fully understand the global context of the image. In order to solve the challenges of multi-label scene images and improve the classification performance, a global context feature extraction module is proposed in this paper. The module combines the semantics information of different regions through a global pooling and three different scale sub-regions pooling, which makes the module have stronger ability of global feature representation. In addition, in order to fully understand the semantic content of remote sensing images, a three branch joint feature extraction module is constructed, which consists of the global context feature module, 3 × 3 convolution branch and identity branch are fused. Finally, a lightweight convolution neural network based on joint features (LCNN-JF) is constructed using traditional convolution, depthwise separable convolution, joint feature extraction module and classifier for remote sensing scene image classification. A series of experimental results on four datasets, UCM, AID, RSSCN and NWPU, demonstrate that the proposed method has better feature representation ability and can achieve better classification of remote sensing scene images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The very high spectral resolution in hyperspectral images (HSIs) offers an opportunity to detect subtle land-cover changes. However, the availability of HSIs acquired from different platforms requires the development of change detection (CD) methods capable of processing HSIs with different spatial resolutions. In this article, we propose a general end-to-end subpixel convolution-based residual network (SPCNet) to accomplish the CD task between high spatial resolution (HR) and low spatial resolution (LR) HSIs. To effectively tackle the resolution matching issue, a super-resolution (SR) block with an efficient subpixel convolution layer is introduced to upscale the LR feature maps into HR maps. The subpixel convolution layer can fully explore the subpixel context information by learning an array of upscaling filters. Moreover, the designed SPC module is embedded into the LR branch to generate more discriminative representations. More importantly, the SPC module as a plug-and-play unit has the potential to be embedded into other baseline networks to enhance the feature learning capability. Experimental results on four HSI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SPCNet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the continuous development of modern remote sensing satellite technology, high-resolution (HR) remote sensing image data have gradually become widely used. However, due to the vastness of areas that need to be monitored and the difficulty in obtaining HR images, most monitoring projects still rely on low-resolution (LR) data for the regions being monitored. The emergence of remote sensing image super-resolution (SR) reconstruction technology effectively compensates for the lack of original HR images. This paper proposes an Improved Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (IESRGAN) based on an enhanced U-Net structure for a 4× scale detail reconstruction of LR images using NaSC-TG2 remote sensing images. In this method, in-depth research has been performed and consequent improvements have been made to the generator and discriminator within the GAN network. Specifically, before introducing Residual-in-Residual Dense Blocks (RRDB), in the proposed method, input images are subjected to reflective padding to enhance edge information. Meanwhile, a U-Net structure is adopted for the discriminator, incorporating spectral normalization to focus on semantic and structural changes between real and fake images, thereby improving generated image quality and GAN performance. To evaluate the effectiveness and generalization ability of our proposed model, experiments were conducted on multiple real-world remote sensing image datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that IESRGAN exhibits strong generalization capabilities while delivering outstanding performance in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS image evaluation metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning techniques have shown increasing potential in change detection (CD) in hyperspectral images (HSIs). However, most deep learning-based existing methods for HSI CD follow a patch-based local learning framework and concentrate on binary CD. In this letter, we propose an end-to-end semantic feature fused global learning (SFFGL) framework for HSI multiclass CD (MCD). In SFFGL, a global spatialwise fully convolutional network (FCN), which introduces a spatial attention mechanism (PAM) between encoder and decoder, is designed to effectively exploit the global spatial information from the whole HSIs and achieve patch-free inference. PAM can adaptively extract global spatialwise feature representation. In the model training stage, a global hierarchical (GH) sampling strategy is introduced to obtain diverse gradients during backpropagation for more robust performance. The semantic–spatial feature fusion ($\text{S}^{2}\text{F}^{2}$) unit is designed to effectively fuse the enhanced spatial context information in the encoder and the semantic information in the decoder. More importantly, a semantic feature enhancement module (SEM) is proposed to weaken the influence of the unchanged regional background on the change regional foreground, thus further improving the accuracy. Experimental results on two benchmark HSI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SFFGL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral image classification (HSIC) is one of the most important research topics in the field of remote sensing. However, it is difficult to label hyperspectral data, which limits the improvement of classification performance of hyperspectral images in the case of small samples. To alleviate this problem, in this paper, a dual-branch network which combines cross-channel dense connection and multi-scale dual aggregated attention (CDC_MDAA) is proposed. On the spatial branch, a cross-channel dense connections (CDC) module is designed. The CDC can effectively combine cross-channel convolution with dense connections to extract the deep spatial features of HSIs. Then, a spatial multi-scale dual aggregated attention module (SPA_MDAA) is constructed. The SPA_MDAA adopts dual autocorrelation for attention modeling to strengthen the differences between features and enhance the ability to pay attention to important features. On the spectral branch, a spectral multi-scale dual aggregated attention module (SPE_MDAA) is designed to capture important spectral features. Finally, the spatial spectral features are fused, and the classification results are obtained. The experimental results show that the classification performance of the proposed method is superior to some state-of-the-art methods in small samples and has good generalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning-based methods (e.g., convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods) have shown increasing potential in hyperspectral image (HSI) change detection (CD). However, the recent advances in CNN-based methods in HSI CD tasks are mostly devoted to designing more complex architectures or adding additional hand-designed blocks. This increases the number of parameters making model training difficult. In this article, we propose an end-to-end residual self-calibrated network (RSCNet) to increase the accuracy of HSI CD. To fully exploit the spatial information, the proposed RSCNet method adaptively builds interspatial and interspectral dependencies around each spatial location with fewer extra parameters and reduced complexity. Moreover, the introduced self-calibrated convolution (SCConv) helps to generate more discriminative representations by heterogeneously exploiting convolutional filters nested in the convolutional layer. The designed RSC module can explicitly incorporate richer information by introducing response calibration operation. The experiments on four bitemporal HSI datasets demonstrated that the proposed RSCNet method is more accurate than ten widely used benchmark methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the hardware limitations of satellite sensors, the spatial resolution of multispectral (MS) images is still not consistent with the panchromatic (PAN) images. It is especially important to obtain the MS images with high spatial resolution in the field of remote sensing image fusion. In order to obtain the MS images with high spatial and spectral resolutions, a novel MS and PAN images fusion method based on weighted mean curvature filter (WMCF) decomposition is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a weighted local spatial frequency-based (WLSF) fusion method is utilized to fuse all the bands of a MS image to generate an intensity component IC. In accordance with an image matting model, IC is taken as the original α channel for spectral estimation to obtain a foreground and background images. Secondly, a PAN image is decomposed into a small-scale (SS), large-scale (LS) and basic images by weighted mean curvature filter (WMCF) and Gaussian filter (GF). The multi-scale morphological detail measure (MSMDM) value is used as the inputs of the Parameters Automatic Calculation Pulse Coupled Neural Network (PAC-PCNN) model. With the MSMDM-guided PAC-PCNN model, the basic image and IC are effectively fused. The fused image as well as the LS and SS images are linearly combined together to construct the last α channel. Finally, in accordance with an image matting model, a foreground image, a background image and the last α channel are reconstructed to acquire the final fused image. The experimental results on four image pairs show that the proposed method achieves superior results in terms of subjective and objective evaluations. In particular, the proposed method can fuse MS and PAN images with different spatial and spectral resolutions in a higher operational efficiency, which is an effective means to obtain higher spatial and spectral resolution images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has become a hot research direction in remote sensing image processing. Benefiting from the development of deep learning, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown extraordinary achievements in HSI classification. Numerous methods combining CNNs and attention mechanisms (AMs) have been proposed for HSI classification. However, to fully mine the features of HSI, some of the previous methods apply dense connections to enhance the feature transfer between each convolution layer. Although dense connections allow these methods to fully extract features in a few training samples, it decreases the model efficiency and increases the computational cost. Furthermore, to balance model performance against complexity, the AMs in these methods compress a large number of channels or spatial resolutions during the training process, which results in a large amount of useful information being discarded. To tackle these issues, in this article, a novel one-shot dense network with polarized attention, namely, OSDN, was proposed for HSI classification. More precisely, since HSI contains rich spectral and spatial information, the OSDN has two independent branches to extract spectral and spatial features, respectively. Similarly, the polarized AMs contain two components: channel-only AMs and spatial-only AMs. Both polarized AMs can use a specially designed filtering method to reduce the complexity of the model while maintaining high internal resolution in both the channel and spatial dimensions. To verify the effectiveness and lightness of OSDN, extensive experiments were carried out on five benchmark HSI datasets, namely, Pavia University (PU), Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Botswana (BS), Houston 2013 (HS), and Salinas Valley (SV). Experimental results consistently showed that the OSDN can greatly reduce computational cost and parameters while maintaining high accuracy in a few training samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In hyperspectral remote sensing, the classification of hyperspectral imagery is an important issue of concern. However, obtaining sufficient labelled samples for the classification is hard work and consumes enormous labour and material resources. To solve this problem, many scholars make their efforts to the semi-supervised learning method. The self-training model is a popular semi-supervised learning method, which trains a classifier using a few labelled samples and many unlabelled samples in an iterative manner. Nevertheless, the self-training model may provide misclassification as adding incorrect unlabelled samples. This paper proposes a novel semi-supervised learning method, which attempts to introduce the affinity propagation and spatial constraint to self-training model. In the proposed algorithm, a self-training model is employed to expand the labelled sample set. The affinity propagation is applied to select a group of reliable unlabelled samples. To further protect the reliability of unlabelled samples, the selection process of self-training model is constrained in the spatial local area of the labelled samples. In the iteration, the reliable unlabelled samples are selected and added to the labelled sample set. After that, the classifier is trained by the updated labelled samples. The algorithm finishes as the iterations exceed the predetermined value or the labelled sample set is unchanged. Different from the traditional self-training-based semi-supervised learning method, there are mainly three improvements. First, the selection of reliable unlabelled samples is conducted by the affinity propagation, which can effectively improve the reliability of the unlabelled samples. Second, the spatial constraint is introduced to restrict the selection process of self-training model, which can protect the reliability of unlabelled samples and alleviate the computational complexity. Finally, the spectral correlation angle is applied to construct the similarity matrix of affinity propagation, so that the algorithm is more suitable for hyperspectral imagery. A comparative analysis was conducted with classical self-training semi-supervised algorithms to test the effectiveness of the method. It was found that the proposed method provided higher overall accuracy, average accuracy and kappa coefficient (κ) than the competitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subpixel mapping based on the Hopfield neural network (HNN) is a technique to handle mixed pixels for obtaining the spatial distribution information of land cover. However, the original low-resolution remote sensing image may contain some uncertainties, such as the diversity of the land cover classes and the limitation of the resolution of the satellite sensor, the existing HNN is unable to fully utilize the prior information of the original image. In order to resolve this problem, an improved HNN (I-HNN) is proposed in this letter. In the proposed I-HNN, additional prior information of the original image is supplied by adding a new processing path to the existing HNN. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, two experiments are conducted on real hyperspectral images. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed I-HNN outperforms the existing HNN. Moreover, the I-HNN does not require any auxiliary data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote sensing images provide a wealth of information for a variety of applications, but it is at the expense of huge data. In this paper, we present a novel compression method based on optimum adaptive directional lifting (OADL) with content-dependent binary tree codec. First, the OADL model is designed, which calculates the optimal prediction direction of each image block and performs the weighted directional adaptive interpolation during the process of lifting. The former aims to reduce the edge and texture energy of the non-horizontal and non-vertical directions in the high-frequency subbands, and the latter focuses on preserving the directional characteristics of remote sensing images as much as possible. Second, a binary tree codec with content-based adaptive scanning is introduced, which can provide different scanning orders and scanning manners among and within subbands, respectively. In addition, it can encode more significant coefficients at the same bit rate. Experimental results show that, compared with other scan-based compression methods, the proposed compression method can always provide better coding performance in terms of some evaluation indexes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a spatial-dictionary (SD) for collaborative representation classification (SCRC) of hyperspectral images. The proposed method consists of four main steps. First, we extract spatial features using 2-D Gabor filters and stack them with spectral features. Second, the SD is constructed by incorporating the spatial information of sparse vectors into the dictionary optimization process. Third, a multiple-mapping kernel is exploited to further integrate spatial information into the CRC framework. Lastly, the test samples are allocated with the class labels. Experimental results obtained on two hyperspectral datasets demonstrate that the proposed SCRC method can yield higher classification accuracy with much lower computational cost when compared to other traditional classifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mixed pixels are widely existent in remote-sensing imagery. Although the proportion occupied by each class in mixed pixels can be determined by spectral unmixing, the spatial distribution of classes remains unknown. Sub-pixel mapping (SPM) addresses this problem and a sub-pixel/pixel spatial attraction model (SPSAM) has been introduced to realize SPM. However, this algorithm fails to adequately consider the correlation between sub-pixels. Consequently, the SPM results created by SPSAM are noisy and the accuracy is limited. In this article, a method based on particle swarm optimization is proposed as post-processing on the SPM results obtained with SPSAM. It searches the most likely spatial distribution of classes in each coarse pixel to improve the SPSAM. Experimental results show that the proposed method can provide higher accuracy and reduce the noise in the results created by SPSAM. When compared with the available modified pixel-swapping algorithm, the proposed method often yields higher accuracy results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In hyperspectral remote sensing, the clustering technique is an important issue of concern. Affinity propagation is a widely used clustering algorithm. However, the complex structure of the hyperspectral image (HSI) dataset presents challenge for the application of affinity propagation. In this paper, an improved version of affinity propagation based on complex wavelet structural similarity index and local outlier factor is proposed specifically for the HSI dataset. In the proposed algorithm, the complex wavelet structural similarity index is used to calculate the spatial similarity of HSI pixels. Meanwhile, the calculation strategy of the spatial similarity is simplified to reduce the computational complexity. The spatial similarity and the traditional spectral similarity of the HSI pixels jointly constitute the similarity matrix of affinity propagation. Furthermore, the local outlier factors are applied as weights to revise the original exemplar preferences of the affinity propagation. Finally, the modified similarity matrix and exemplar preferences are applied, and the clustering index is obtained by the traditional affinity propagation. Extensive experiments were conducted on three HSI datasets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the performance of the traditional affinity propagation and provide competitive clustering results among the competitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, convolution neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used in the field of remote sensing scene image classification. However, CNN models with good classification performance tend to have high complexity, and CNN models with low complexity are difficult to obtain high classification accuracy. These models hardly achieve a good trade-off between classification accuracy and model complexity. To solve this problem, we made the following three improvements and proposed a lightweight modular network model. First, we proposed a lightweight self-compensated convolution (SCC). Although traditional convolution can effectively extract features from the input feature map, when there are a large number of filters (such as 512 or 1024 common filters), this process takes a long time. To speed up the network without increasing the computational load, we proposed a self-compensated convolution. The core idea of this convolution is to perform traditional convolution by reducing the number of filters, and then compensate the convoluted channels by input features. It incorporates shallow features into the deep and complex features, which helps to improve the speed and classification accuracy of the model. In addition, we proposed a self-compensating bottleneck module (SCBM) based on the self-compensating convolution. The wider channel shortcut in this module facilitates more shallow information to be transferred to the deeper layer and improves the feature extraction ability of the model. Finally, we used the proposed self-compensation bottleneck module to construct a lightweight and modular self-compensation convolution neural network (SCCNN) for remote sensing scene image classification. The network is built by reusing bottleneck modules with the same structure. A lot of experiments were carried out on six open and challenging remote sensing image scene datasets. The experimental results show that the classification performance of the proposed method is superior to some of the state-of-the-art classification methods with less parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectral unmixing is one of the important techniques for hyperspectral data processing. The analysis of spectral mixing is often based on a linear, fully constrained (FC) (i.e., nonnegative and sum-to-one mixture proportions), and least squares criterion. However, the traditional iterative processing of FC least squares (FCLS) linear spectral mixture analysis (LSMA) (FCLS-LSMA) is of heavy computational burden. Recently developed geometric LSMA methods decreased the complexity to some degree, but how to further reduce the computational burden and completely meet the FCLS criterion of minimizing the unmixing residual needs to be explored. In this paper, a simple distance measure is proposed, and then, a new geometric FCLS-LSMA method is constructed based on the distance measure. The method is in line with the FCLS criterion, free of iteration and dimension reduction, and with very low complexity. Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain the same optimal FCLS solution as the traditional iteration-based FCLS-LSMA, and it is much faster than the existing spectral unmixing methods, particularly the traditional iteration-based method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subpixel mapping (SPM) is a promising technique to increase the spatial resolution of land cover maps. Markov random field (MRF)-based SPM has the advantages of considering spatial and spectral constraints simultaneously. In the conventional MRF, only the spectral information of one observed coarse spatial resolution image is utilized, which limits the SPM accuracy. In this letter, supplementary information from subpixel shifted remote sensing images (SSRSI) is used with MRF to produce more accurate SPM results. That is, spectral information from SSRSI is incorporated into the likelihood energy function of MRF to provide multiple spectral constraints. Simulated and real images were tested with the subpixel/pixel spatial attraction model, Hopfield neural networks (HNNs), HNN with SSRSI, image interpolation then hard classification, conventional MRF, and proposed MRF with SSRSI based SPM methods. Results showed that the proposed method can generate the most accurate SPM results among these methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the development of computer vision, attention mechanisms have been widely studied. Although the introduction of an attention module into a network model can help to improve classification performance on remote sensing scene images, the direct introduction of an attention module can increase the number of model parameters and amount of calculation, resulting in slower model operations. To solve this problem, we carried out the following work. First, a channel attention module and spatial attention module were constructed. The input features were enhanced through channel attention and spatial attention separately, and the features recalibrated by the attention modules were fused to obtain the features with hybrid attention. Then, to reduce the increase in parameters caused by the attention module, a group-wise hybrid attention module was constructed. The group-wise hybrid attention module divided the input features into four groups along the channel dimension, then used the hybrid attention mechanism to enhance the features in the channel and spatial dimensions for each group, then fused the features of the four groups along the channel dimension. Through the use of the group-wise hybrid attention module, the number of parameters and computational burden of the network were greatly reduced, and the running time of the network was shortened. Finally, a lightweight convolutional neural network was constructed based on the group-wise hybrid attention (LCNN-GWHA) for remote sensing scene image classification. Experiments on four open and challenging remote sensing scene datasets demonstrated that the proposed method has great advantages, in terms of classification accuracy, even with a very low number of parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of remote sensing scene image classification, convolutional neural networks have become the most commonly used method in this field with their powerful feature extraction ability. In order to improve the classification performance of convolutional neural networks, many studies extract deeper features by increasing the depth and width of convolutional neural networks, which improves classification performance but also increases the complexity of the model. To solve this problem, a lightweight convolutional neural network based on channel multi-group fusion (LCNN-CMGF) is presented. For the proposed LCNN-CMGF method, a three-branch downsampling structure was designed to extract shallow features from remote sensing images. In the deep layer of the network, the channel multi-group fusion structure is used to extract the abstract semantic features of remote sensing scene images. The structure solves the problem of lack of information exchange between groups caused by group convolution through channel fusion of adjacent features. The four most commonly used remote sensing scene datasets, UCM21, RSSCN7, AID and NWPU45, were used to carry out a variety of experiments in this paper. The experimental results under the conditions of four datasets and multiple training ratios show that the proposed LCNN-CMGF method has more significant performance advantages than the compared advanced method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For remote sensing scene image classification, many convolution neural networks improve the classification accuracy at the cost of the time and space complexity of the models. This leads to a slow running speed for the model and cannot realize a trade-off between the model accuracy and the model running speed. As the network deepens, it is difficult to extract the key features with a sample double branched structure, and it also leads to the loss of shallow features, which is unfavorable to the classification of remote sensing scene images. To solve this problem, we propose a dual branch multi-level feature dense fusion-based lightweight convolutional neural network (BMDF-LCNN). The network structure can fully extract the information of the current layer through 3 × 3 depthwise separable convolution and 1 × 1 standard convolution, identity branches, and fuse with the features extracted from the previous layer 1 × 1 standard convolution, thus avoiding the loss of shallow information due to network deepening. In addition, we propose a downsampling structure that is more suitable for extracting the shallow features of the network by using the pooled branch to downsample and the convolution branch to compensate for the pooled features. Experiments were carried out on four open and challenging remote sensing image scene data sets. The experimental results show that the proposed method has higher classification accuracy and lower model complexity than some state-of-the-art classification methods and realizes the trade-off between model accuracy and model running speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, with the rapid development of computer vision, increasing attention has been paid to remote sensing image scene classification. To improve the classification performance, many studies have increased the depth of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and expanded the width of the network to extract more deep features, thereby increasing the complexity of the model. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a lightweight convolutional neural network based on attention-oriented multi-branch feature fusion (AMB-CNN) for remote sensing image scene classification. Firstly, we propose two convolution combination modules for feature extraction, through which the deep features of images can be fully extracted with multi convolution cooperation. Then, the weights of the feature are calculated, and the extracted deep features are sent to the attention mechanism for further feature extraction. Next, all of the extracted features are fused by multiple branches. Finally, depth separable convolution and asymmetric convolution are implemented to greatly reduce the number of parameters. The experimental results show that, compared with some state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method still has a great advantage in classification accuracy with very few parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Segmenting clouds and their shadows is a critical challenge in remote sensing image processing. The shape, texture, lighting conditions, and background of clouds and their shadows impact the effectiveness of cloud detection. Currently, architectures that maintain high resolution throughout the entire information-extraction process are rapidly emerging. This parallel architecture, combining high and low resolutions, produces detailed high-resolution representations, enhancing segmentation prediction accuracy. This paper continues the parallel architecture of high and low resolution. When handling high- and low-resolution images, this paper employs a hybrid approach combining the Transformer and CNN models. This method facilitates interaction between the two models, enabling the extraction of both semantic and spatial details from the images. To address the challenge of inadequate fusion and significant information loss between high- and low-resolution images, this paper introduces a method based on ASMA (Axial Sharing Mixed Attention). This approach establishes pixel-level dependencies between high-resolution and low-resolution images, aiming to enhance the efficiency of image fusion. In addition, to enhance the effective focus on critical information in remote sensing images, the AGM (Attention Guide Module) is introduced, to integrate attention elements from original features into ASMA, to alleviate the problem of insufficient channel modeling of the self-attention mechanism. Our experimental results on the Cloud and Cloud Shadow dataset, the SPARCS dataset, and the CSWV dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, surpassing the state-of-the-art techniques for cloud and cloud shadow segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the limitations of storage and transmission in remote sensing scenarios, lossy compression techniques have been commonly considered for remote sensing images. Inspired by the latest development in image coding techniques, we present in this paper a new compression framework, which combines the directional adaptive lifting partitioned block transform (DAL-PBT) with content-driven quadtree codec with optimized truncation (CQOT). First, the DAL-PBT model is designed; it calculates the optimal prediction directions of each image block and performs the weighted directional adaptive interpolation during the process of directional lifting. Secondly, the CQOT method is proposed, which provides different scanning orders among and within blocks based on image content, and encodes those blocks with a quadtree codec with optimized truncation. The two phases are closely related: the former is devoted to image representation for preserving more directional information of remote sensing images, and the latter leverages adaptive scanning on the transformed image blocks to further improve coding efficiency. The proposed method supports various progressive transmission modes. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms not only the mainstream compression methods, such as JPEG2000 and CCSDS, but also, in terms of some evaluation indexes, some state-of-the-art compression methods presented recently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• MS3Net is designed with a dual-stream symmetric structure for HSI classification. • Stratified-split module can promote the extraction of multiscale features. • Quadra-view attention can focus on valuable features from different dimensions. • Experimental results on four HSI datasets show the effectiveness of our method. Recently, hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has become a promising research direction in remote sensing image processing. Many HSI classification methods have been proposed based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and attention mechanisms (AMs). However, most current CNN-based methods only consider extracting features at a single scale in HSI, which may ignore the delicate features of some objects. Moreover, present AMs primarily focus on one feature dimension, such as spatial or channel attention, while disregarding dimension interaction. To conquer the above issues, a novel multiscale stratified-split symmetric network with quadra-view attention, namely MS3Net, is proposed for HSI classification. Generally, the proposed MS3Net has a dual-stream symmetric pipeline, which can better extract HSI's spectral signatures and spatial features. Specifically, the proposed MS3Net consists of three modules: a multiscale feature extraction module, a feature enhancement module, and a feature fusion module. Firstly, a stratified-split module is designed to extract multiscale spectral and spatial features. In addition, to reduce the complexity of the model, we designed pseudo-3-D spectral and spatial convolution to replace the traditional 3-D convolution operation. Secondly, a novel quadra-view attention module is proposed, guiding the model to focus on important features from multiple dimensions. Finally, the selective kernel feature fusion module is introduced, which can dynamically integrate spectral and spatial features. Experimental results on four benchmark HSI datasets with different scenes and resolutions confirm the visual and quantitative superiority of the proposed MS3Net over the state-of-the-art related methods in this research direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Desert segmentation of remote sensing images is the basis of analysis of desert area. Desert images are usually characterized by large image size, large-scale change, and irregular location distribution of surface objects. The multi-scale fusion method is widely used in the existing deep learning segmentation models to solve the above problems. Based on the idea of multi-scale feature extraction, this paper took the segmentation results of each scale as an independent optimization task and proposed a multi-resolution supervision network (MrsSeg) to further improve the desert segmentation result. Due to the different optimization difficulty of each branch task, we also proposed an auxiliary adaptive weighted loss function (AWL) to automatically optimize the training process. MrsSeg first used a lightweight backbone to extract different-resolution features, then adopted a multi-resolution fusion module to fuse the local information and global information, and finally, a multi-level fusion decoder was used to aggregate and merge the features at different levels to get the desert segmentation result. In this method, each branch loss was treated as an independent task, AWL was proposed to calculate and adjust the weight of each branch. By giving priority to the easy tasks, the improved loss function could effectively improve the convergence speed of the model and the desert segmentation result. The experimental results showed that MrsSeg-AWL effectively improved the learning ability of the model and has faster convergence speed, lower parameter complexity, and more accurate segmentation results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]