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Our understanding of the temporal dynamics of the Earth's surface has been advanced by deep vision models, which often require lots of labeled multi-temporal images for training. However, collecting, preprocessing, and annotating multi-temporal remote sensing images at scale is non-trivial since it is expensive and knowledge-intensive. In this paper, we present change data generators based on generative models, which are cheap and automatic, alleviating these data problems. Our main idea is to simulate a stochastic change process over time. We describe the stochastic change process as a probabilistic graphical model (GPCM), which factorizes the complex simulation problem into two more tractable sub-problems, i.e., change event simulation and semantic change synthesis. To solve these two problems, we present Changen2, a GPCM with a resolution-scalable diffusion transformer which can generate time series of images and their semantic and change labels from labeled or unlabeled single-temporal images. Changen2 is a generative change foundation model that can be trained at scale via self-supervision, and can produce change supervisory signals from unlabeled single-temporal images. Unlike existing foundation models, Changen2 synthesizes change data to train task-specific foundation models for change detection. The resulting model possesses inherent zero-shot change detection capabilities and excellent transferability. Experiments suggest Changen2 has superior spatiotemporal scalability, e.g., Changen2 model trained on 256$^2$ pixel single-temporal images can yield time series of any length and resolutions of 1,024$^2$ pixels. Changen2 pre-trained models exhibit superior zero-shot performance (narrowing the performance gap to 3% on LEVIR-CD and approximately 10% on both S2Looking and SECOND, compared to fully supervised counterparts) and transferability across multiple types of change tasks., Comment: The enhanced extension of our ICCV 2023 (Changen)

Bitemporal supervised learning paradigm always dominates remote sensing change detection using numerous labeled bitemporal image pairs, especially for high spatial resolution (HSR) remote sensing imagery. However, it is very expensive and labor-intensive to label change regions in large-scale bitemporal HSR remote sensing image pairs. In this paper, we propose single-temporal supervised learning (STAR) for universal remote sensing change detection from a new perspective of exploiting changes between unpaired images as supervisory signals. STAR enables us to train a high-accuracy change detector only using unpaired labeled images and can generalize to real-world bitemporal image pairs. To demonstrate the flexibility and scalability of STAR, we design a simple yet unified change detector, termed ChangeStar2, capable of addressing binary change detection, object change detection, and semantic change detection in one architecture. ChangeStar2 achieves state-of-the-art performances on eight public remote sensing change detection datasets, covering above two supervised settings, multiple change types, multiple scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/Z-Zheng/pytorch-change-models., Comment: IJCV 2024. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2108.07002

Foundation models (FMs) are revolutionizing the analysis and understanding of remote sensing (RS) scenes, including aerial RGB, multispectral, and SAR images. However, hyperspectral images (HSIs), which are rich in spectral information, have not seen much application of FMs, with existing methods often restricted to specific tasks and lacking generality. To fill this gap, we introduce HyperSIGMA, a vision transformer-based foundation model for HSI interpretation, scalable to over a billion parameters. To tackle the spectral and spatial redundancy challenges in HSIs, we introduce a novel sparse sampling attention (SSA) mechanism, which effectively promotes the learning of diverse contextual features and serves as the basic block of HyperSIGMA. HyperSIGMA integrates spatial and spectral features using a specially designed spectral enhancement module. In addition, we construct a large-scale hyperspectral dataset, HyperGlobal-450K, for pre-training, which contains about 450K hyperspectral images, significantly surpassing existing datasets in scale. Extensive experiments on various high-level and low-level HSI tasks demonstrate HyperSIGMA's versatility and superior representational capability compared to current state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, HyperSIGMA shows significant advantages in scalability, robustness, cross-modal transferring capability, and real-world applicability., Comment: The code and models will be released at https://github.com/WHU-Sigma/HyperSIGMA

Foundation models have reshaped the landscape of Remote Sensing (RS) by enhancing various image interpretation tasks. Pretraining is an active research topic, encompassing supervised and self-supervised learning methods to initialize model weights effectively. However, transferring the pretrained models to downstream tasks may encounter task discrepancy due to their formulation of pretraining as image classification or object discrimination tasks. In this study, we explore the Multi-Task Pretraining (MTP) paradigm for RS foundation models to address this issue. Using a shared encoder and task-specific decoder architecture, we conduct multi-task supervised pretraining on the SAMRS dataset, encompassing semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and rotated object detection. MTP supports both convolutional neural networks and vision transformer foundation models with over 300 million parameters. The pretrained models are finetuned on various RS downstream tasks, such as scene classification, horizontal and rotated object detection, semantic segmentation, and change detection. Extensive experiments across 14 datasets demonstrate the superiority of our models over existing ones of similar size and their competitive performance compared to larger state-of-the-art models, thus validating the effectiveness of MTP., Comment: Accepted by IEEE JSTARS Special issue on "Large-Scale Pretraining for Interpretation Promotion in Remote Sensing Domain". The codes and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/MTP

Visual foundation models have achieved remarkable results in zero-shot image classification and segmentation, but zero-shot change detection remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose the segment any change models (AnyChange), a new type of change detection model that supports zero-shot prediction and generalization on unseen change types and data distributions. AnyChange is built on the segment anything model (SAM) via our training-free adaptation method, bitemporal latent matching. By revealing and exploiting intra-image and inter-image semantic similarities in SAM's latent space, bitemporal latent matching endows SAM with zero-shot change detection capabilities in a training-free way. We also propose a point query mechanism to enable AnyChange's zero-shot object-centric change detection capability. We perform extensive experiments to confirm the effectiveness of AnyChange for zero-shot change detection. AnyChange sets a new record on the SECOND benchmark for unsupervised change detection, exceeding the previous SOTA by up to 4.4% F$_1$ score, and achieving comparable accuracy with negligible manual annotations (1 pixel per image) for supervised change detection., Comment: technical report, 12 pages

Data collected by different modalities can provide a wealth of complementary information, such as hyperspectral image (HSI) to offer rich spectral-spatial properties, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to provide structural information about the Earth's surface, and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) to cover altitude information about ground elevation. Therefore, a natural idea is to combine multimodal images for refined and accurate land-cover interpretation. Although many efforts have been attempted to achieve multi-source remote sensing image classification, there are still three issues as follows: 1) indiscriminate feature representation without sufficiently considering modal heterogeneity, 2) abundant features and complex computations associated with modeling long-range dependencies, and 3) overfitting phenomenon caused by sparsely labeled samples. To overcome the above barriers, a transformer-based heterogeneously salient graph representation (THSGR) approach is proposed in this paper. First, a multimodal heterogeneous graph encoder is presented to encode distinctively non-Euclidean structural features from heterogeneous data. Then, a self-attention-free multi-convolutional modulator is designed for effective and efficient long-term dependency modeling. Finally, a mean forward is put forward in order to avoid overfitting. Based on the above structures, the proposed model is able to break through modal gaps to obtain differentiated graph representation with competitive time cost, even for a small fraction of training samples. Experiments and analyses on three benchmark datasets with various state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods show the performance of the proposed approach.

Recently, convolutional networks have achieved remarkable development in remote sensing image Super-Resoltuion (SR) by minimizing the regression objectives, e.g., MSE loss. However, despite achieving impressive performance, these methods often suffer from poor visual quality with over-smooth issues. Generative adversarial networks have the potential to infer intricate details, but they are easy to collapse, resulting in undesirable artifacts. To mitigate these issues, in this paper, we first introduce Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DPM) for efficient remote sensing image SR, dubbed EDiffSR. EDiffSR is easy to train and maintains the merits of DPM in generating perceptual-pleasant images. Specifically, different from previous works using heavy UNet for noise prediction, we develop an Efficient Activation Network (EANet) to achieve favorable noise prediction performance by simplified channel attention and simple gate operation, which dramatically reduces the computational budget. Moreover, to introduce more valuable prior knowledge into the proposed EDiffSR, a practical Conditional Prior Enhancement Module (CPEM) is developed to help extract an enriched condition. Unlike most DPM-based SR models that directly generate conditions by amplifying LR images, the proposed CPEM helps to retain more informative cues for accurate SR. Extensive experiments on four remote sensing datasets demonstrate that EDiffSR can restore visual-pleasant images on simulated and real-world remote sensing images, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The code of EDiffSR will be available at https://github.com/XY-boy/EDiffSR, Comment: Submitted to IEEE TGRS

Remote sensing anomaly detector can find the objects deviating from the background as potential targets. Given the diversity in earth anomaly types, a unified anomaly detector across modalities and scenes should be cost-effective and flexible to new earth observation sources and anomaly types. However, the current anomaly detectors are limited to a single modality and single scene, since they aim to learn the varying background distribution. Motivated by the universal anomaly deviation pattern, in that anomalies exhibit deviations from their local context, we exploit this characteristic to build a unified anomaly detector. Firstly, we reformulate the anomaly detection task as an undirected bilayer graph based on the deviation relationship, where the anomaly score is modeled as the conditional probability, given the pattern of the background and normal objects. The learning objective is then expressed as a conditional probability ranking problem. Furthermore, we design an instantiation of the reformulation in the data, architecture, and optimization aspects. Simulated spectral and spatial anomalies drive the instantiated architecture. The model is optimized directly for the conditional probability ranking. The proposed model was validated in five modalities including the hyperspectral, visible light, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), infrared and low light to show its unified detection ability., Comment: Journal paper

Understanding the temporal dynamics of Earth's surface is a mission of multi-temporal remote sensing image analysis, significantly promoted by deep vision models with its fuel -- labeled multi-temporal images. However, collecting, preprocessing, and annotating multi-temporal remote sensing images at scale is non-trivial since it is expensive and knowledge-intensive. In this paper, we present a scalable multi-temporal remote sensing change data generator via generative modeling, which is cheap and automatic, alleviating these problems. Our main idea is to simulate a stochastic change process over time. We consider the stochastic change process as a probabilistic semantic state transition, namely generative probabilistic change model (GPCM), which decouples the complex simulation problem into two more trackable sub-problems, \ie, change event simulation and semantic change synthesis. To solve these two problems, we present the change generator (Changen), a GAN-based GPCM, enabling controllable object change data generation, including customizable object property, and change event. The extensive experiments suggest that our Changen has superior generation capability, and the change detectors with Changen pre-training exhibit excellent transferability to real-world change datasets., Comment: ICCV 2023

Change detection (CD) is a fundamental and important task for monitoring the land surface dynamics in the earth observation field. Existing deep learning-based CD methods typically extract bi-temporal image features using a weight-sharing Siamese encoder network and identify change regions using a decoder network. These CD methods, however, still perform far from satisfactorily as we observe that 1) deep encoder layers focus on irrelevant background regions and 2) the models' confidence in the change regions is inconsistent at different decoder stages. The first problem is because deep encoder layers cannot effectively learn from imbalanced change categories using the sole output supervision, while the second problem is attributed to the lack of explicit semantic consistency preservation. To address these issues, we design a novel similarity-aware attention flow network (SAAN). SAAN incorporates a similarity-guided attention flow module with deeply supervised similarity optimization to achieve effective change detection. Specifically, we counter the first issue by explicitly guiding deep encoder layers to discover semantic relations from bi-temporal input images using deeply supervised similarity optimization. The extracted features are optimized to be semantically similar in the unchanged regions and dissimilar in the changing regions. The second drawback can be alleviated by the proposed similarity-guided attention flow module, which incorporates similarity-guided attention modules and attention flow mechanisms to guide the model to focus on discriminative channels and regions. We evaluated the effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed method by conducting experiments on a wide range of CD tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves excellent performance on several CD tasks, with discriminative features and semantic consistency preserved., Comment: 15 pages,13 figures

Building extraction aims to segment building pixels from remote sensing images and plays an essential role in many applications, such as city planning and urban dynamic monitoring. Over the past few years, deep learning methods with encoder-decoder architectures have achieved remarkable performance due to their powerful feature representation capability. Nevertheless, due to the varying scales and styles of buildings, conventional deep learning models always suffer from uncertain predictions and cannot accurately distinguish the complete footprints of the building from the complex distribution of ground objects, leading to a large degree of omission and commission. In this paper, we realize the importance of uncertain prediction and propose a novel and straightforward Uncertainty-Aware Network (UANet) to alleviate this problem. To verify the performance of our proposed UANet, we conduct extensive experiments on three public building datasets, including the WHU building dataset, the Massachusetts building dataset, and the Inria aerial image dataset. Results demonstrate that the proposed UANet outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms by a large margin.

Buildings are the basic carrier of social production and human life; roads are the links that interconnect social networks. Building and road information has important application value in the frontier fields of regional coordinated development, disaster prevention, auto-driving, etc. Mapping buildings and roads from very high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing images have become a hot research topic. However, the existing methods often ignore the strong spatial correlation between roads and buildings and extract them in isolation. To fully utilize the complementary advantages between buildings and roads, we propose a building-road collaborative extraction method based on multi-task and cross-scale feature interaction to improve the accuracy of both tasks in a complementary way. A multi-task interaction module is proposed to interact information across tasks and preserve the unique information of each task, which tackle the seesaw phenomenon in multitask learning. By considering the variation in appearance and structure between buildings and roads, a cross-scale interaction module is designed to automatically learn the optimal reception field for different tasks. Compared with many existing methods that train each task individually, the proposed collaborative extraction method can utilize the complementary advantages between buildings and roads by the proposed inter-task and inter-scale feature interactions, and automatically select the optimal reception field for different tasks. Experiments on a wide range of urban and rural scenarios show that the proposed algorithm can achieve building-road extraction with outstanding performance and efficiency., Comment: IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing

Change detection (CD) is an important yet challenging task in the Earth observation field for monitoring Earth surface dynamics. The advent of deep learning techniques has recently propelled automatic CD into a technological revolution. Nevertheless, deep learning-based CD methods are still plagued by two primary issues: 1) insufficient temporal relationship modeling and 2) pseudo-change misclassification. To address these issues, we complement the strong temporal modeling ability of metric learning with the prominent fitting ability of segmentation and propose a deep change feature learning (DeepCL) framework for robust and explainable CD. Firstly, we designed a hard sample-aware contrastive loss, which reweights the importance of hard and simple samples. This loss allows for explicit modeling of the temporal correlation between bi-temporal remote sensing images. Furthermore, the modeled temporal relations are utilized as knowledge prior to guide the segmentation process for detecting change regions. The DeepCL framework is thoroughly evaluated both theoretically and experimentally, demonstrating its superior feature discriminability, resilience against pseudo changes, and adaptability to a variety of CD algorithms. Extensive comparative experiments substantiate the quantitative and qualitative superiority of DeepCL over state-of-the-art CD approaches., Comment: 12 pages,7 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Image Processing

The efficacy of building footprint segmentation from remotely sensed images has been hindered by model transfer effectiveness. Many existing building segmentation methods were developed upon the encoder-decoder architecture of U-Net, in which the encoder is finetuned from the newly developed backbone networks that are pre-trained on ImageNet. However, the heavy computational burden of the existing decoder designs hampers the successful transfer of these modern encoder networks to remote sensing tasks. Even the widely-adopted deep supervision strategy fails to mitigate these challenges due to its invalid loss in hybrid regions where foreground and background pixels are intermixed. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of existing decoder network designs for building footprint segmentation and propose an efficient framework denoted as BFSeg to enhance learning efficiency and effectiveness. Specifically, a densely-connected coarse-to-fine feature fusion decoder network that facilitates easy and fast feature fusion across scales is proposed. Moreover, considering the invalidity of hybrid regions in the down-sampled ground truth during the deep supervision process, we present a lenient deep supervision and distillation strategy that enables the network to learn proper knowledge from deep supervision. Building upon these advancements, we have developed a new family of building segmentation networks, which consistently surpass prior works with outstanding performance and efficiency across a wide range of newly developed encoder networks.

The success of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrates the significance of data-centric machine learning. However, due to the difficulties and high costs associated with annotating Remote Sensing (RS) images, a large amount of valuable RS data remains unlabeled, particularly at the pixel level. In this study, we leverage SAM and existing RS object detection datasets to develop an efficient pipeline for generating a large-scale RS segmentation dataset, dubbed SAMRS. SAMRS totally possesses 105,090 images and 1,668,241 instances, surpassing existing high-resolution RS segmentation datasets in size by several orders of magnitude. It provides object category, location, and instance information that can be used for semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and object detection, either individually or in combination. We also provide a comprehensive analysis of SAMRS from various aspects. Moreover, preliminary experiments highlight the importance of conducting segmentation pre-training with SAMRS to address task discrepancies and alleviate the limitations posed by limited training data during fine-tuning. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/SAMRS., Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2023 Datasets and Benchmarks Track

With the world population rapidly increasing, transforming our agrifood systems to be more productive, efficient, safe, and sustainable is crucial to mitigate potential food shortages. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as deep learning (DL) have demonstrated their strong abilities in various areas, including language, vision, remote sensing (RS), and agrifood systems applications. However, the overall impact of AI on agrifood systems remains unclear. In this paper, we thoroughly review how AI techniques can transform agrifood systems and contribute to the modern agrifood industry. Firstly, we summarize the data acquisition methods in agrifood systems, including acquisition, storage, and processing techniques. Secondly, we present a progress review of AI methods in agrifood systems, specifically in agriculture, animal husbandry, and fishery, covering topics such as agrifood classification, growth monitoring, yield prediction, and quality assessment. Furthermore, we highlight potential challenges and promising research opportunities for transforming modern agrifood systems with AI. We hope this survey could offer an overall picture to newcomers in the field and serve as a starting point for their further research., Comment: Submitted to ACM

Recent neural architecture search (NAS) based approaches have made great progress in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification tasks. However, the architectures are usually optimized independently of the network weights, increasing searching time and restricting model performances. To tackle these issues, in this paper, different from previous methods that extra define structural parameters, we propose to directly generate structural parameters by utilizing the specifically designed hyper kernels, ingeniously converting the original complex dual optimization problem into easily implemented one-tier optimizations, and greatly shrinking searching costs. Then, we develop a hierarchical multi-module search space whose candidate operations only contain convolutions, and these operations can be integrated into unified kernels. Using the above searching strategy and searching space, we obtain three kinds of networks to separately conduct pixel-level or image-level classifications with 1-D or 3-D convolutions. In addition, by combining the proposed hyper kernel searching scheme with the 3-D convolution decomposition mechanism, we obtain diverse architectures to simulate 3-D convolutions, greatly improving network flexibilities. A series of quantitative and qualitative experiments on six public datasets demonstrate that the proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art results compared with other advanced NAS-based HSI classification approaches., Comment: Accepted by IEEE TNNLS. The code will be released at https://github.com/DotWang/HKNAS

Wearing face mask is an effective measure to reduce the risk of COVID-19 infections and control its transmission, thus its usage survey is important for better policy decision to mitigate the epidemic spread. Current existing worldwide surveys are mostly self-reported, whose accuracies are hard to guaranteed, and may exaggerate the percentage of face mask wearing. Therefore, we collected busking videos with a large amount on YouTube from December 2019 to December 2020, mainly from South Korea, and reported an objective investigation of face mask use in the crowds outdoor. It is found that the face mask wearing rate has an obvious positive correlation with effective reproductive number (Rt) in the South Korea, which indicates that the people in South Korea kept sensitive to the COVID-19 epidemic. The face mask wearing rate in South Korea is higher than some other countries, and two rate droppings in June and September also corresponds to the temporary remission in 2020. This study shows significant potentials to utilize public big video data to make an accurate worldwide survey of face mask use with the support of deep learning technology.

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification is challenging due to spatial variability caused by complex imaging conditions. Prior methods suffer from limited representation ability, as they train specially designed networks from scratch on limited annotated data. We propose a tri-spectral image generation pipeline that transforms HSI into high-quality tri-spectral images, enabling the use of off-the-shelf ImageNet pretrained backbone networks for feature extraction. Motivated by the observation that there are many homogeneous areas with distinguished semantic and geometric properties in HSIs, which can be used to extract useful contexts, we propose an end-to-end segmentation network named DCN-T. It adopts transformers to effectively encode regional adaptation and global aggregation spatial contexts within and between the homogeneous areas discovered by similarity-based clustering. To fully exploit the rich spectrums of the HSI, we adopt an ensemble approach where all segmentation results of the tri-spectral images are integrated into the final prediction through a voting scheme. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods for HSI classification., Comment: Accepted by IEEE TIP. The code will be released at https://github.com/DotWang/DCN-T

High spectral resolution imagery of the Earth's surface enables users to monitor changes over time in fine-grained scale, playing an increasingly important role in agriculture, defense, and emergency response. However, most current algorithms are still confined to describing local features and fail to incorporate a global perspective, which limits their ability to capture interactions between global features, thus usually resulting in incomplete change regions. In this paper, we propose a Global Multi-head INteractive self-attention change Detection network (GlobalMind) to explore the implicit correlation between different surface objects and variant land cover transformations, acquiring a comprehensive understanding of the data and accurate change detection result. Firstly, a simple but effective Global Axial Segmentation (GAS) strategy is designed to expand the self-attention computation along the row space or column space of hyperspectral images, allowing the global connection with high efficiency. Secondly, with GAS, the global spatial multi-head interactive self-attention (Global-M) module is crafted to mine the abundant spatial-spectral feature involving potential correlations between the ground objects from the entire rich and complex hyperspectral space. Moreover, to acquire the accurate and complete cross-temporal changes, we devise a global temporal interactive multi-head self-attention (GlobalD) module which incorporates the relevance and variation of bi-temporal spatial-spectral features, deriving the integrate potential same kind of changes in the local and global range with the combination of GAS. We perform extensive experiments on five mostly used hyperspectral datasets, and our method outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms with high accuracy and efficiency., Comment: 14 page, 18 figures

Optical-flow-based and kernel-based approaches have been extensively explored for temporal compensation in satellite Video Super-Resolution (VSR). However, these techniques are less generalized in large-scale or complex scenarios, especially in satellite videos. In this paper, we propose to exploit the well-defined temporal difference for efficient and effective temporal compensation. To fully utilize the local and global temporal information within frames, we systematically modeled the short-term and long-term temporal discrepancies since we observed that these discrepancies offer distinct and mutually complementary properties. Specifically, we devise a Short-term Temporal Difference Module (S-TDM) to extract local motion representations from RGB difference maps between adjacent frames, which yields more clues for accurate texture representation. To explore the global dependency in the entire frame sequence, a Long-term Temporal Difference Module (L-TDM) is proposed, where the differences between forward and backward segments are incorporated and activated to guide the modulation of the temporal feature, leading to a holistic global compensation. Moreover, we further propose a Difference Compensation Unit (DCU) to enrich the interaction between the spatial distribution of the target frame and temporal compensated results, which helps maintain spatial consistency while refining the features to avoid misalignment. Rigorous objective and subjective evaluations conducted across five mainstream video satellites demonstrate that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art approaches. Code will be available at https://github.com/XY-boy/LGTD, Comment: Accepted by IEEE TCSVT

Hyperspectral anomaly detection (HAD) involves identifying the targets that deviate spectrally from their surroundings, without prior knowledge. Recently, deep learning based methods have become the mainstream HAD methods, due to their powerful spatial-spectral feature extraction ability. However, the current deep detection models are optimized to complete a proxy task (two-step paradigm), such as background reconstruction or generation, rather than achieving anomaly detection directly. This leads to suboptimal results and poor transferability, which means that the deep model is trained and tested on the same image. In this paper, an unsupervised transferred direct detection (TDD) model is proposed, which is optimized directly for the anomaly detection task (one-step paradigm) and has transferability. Specially, the TDD model is optimized to identify the spectral deviation relationship according to the anomaly definition. Compared to learning the specific background distribution as most models do, the spectral deviation relationship is universal for different images and guarantees the model transferability. To train the TDD model in an unsupervised manner, an anomaly sample simulation strategy is proposed to generate numerous pairs of anomaly samples. Furthermore, a global self-attention module and a local self-attention module are designed to help the model focus on the "spectrally deviating" relationship. The TDD model was validated on four public HAD datasets. The results show that the proposed TDD model can successfully overcome the limitation of traditional model training and testing on a single image, and the model has a powerful detection ability and excellent transferability.

Diffusion models have recently received a surge of interest due to their impressive performance for image restoration, especially in terms of noise robustness. However, existing diffusion-based methods are trained on a large amount of training data and perform very well in-distribution, but can be quite susceptible to distribution shift. This is especially inappropriate for data-starved hyperspectral image (HSI) restoration. To tackle this problem, this work puts forth a self-supervised diffusion model for HSI restoration, namely Denoising Diffusion Spatio-Spectral Model (\texttt{DDS2M}), which works by inferring the parameters of the proposed Variational Spatio-Spectral Module (VS2M) during the reverse diffusion process, solely using the degraded HSI without any extra training data. In VS2M, a variational inference-based loss function is customized to enable the untrained spatial and spectral networks to learn the posterior distribution, which serves as the transitions of the sampling chain to help reverse the diffusion process. Benefiting from its self-supervised nature and the diffusion process, \texttt{DDS2M} enjoys stronger generalization ability to various HSIs compared to existing diffusion-based methods and superior robustness to noise compared to existing HSI restoration methods. Extensive experiments on HSI denoising, noisy HSI completion and super-resolution on a variety of HSIs demonstrate \texttt{DDS2M}'s superiority over the existing task-specific state-of-the-arts., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures

This article presents Holistically-Attracted Wireframe Parsing (HAWP), a method for geometric analysis of 2D images containing wireframes formed by line segments and junctions. HAWP utilizes a parsimonious Holistic Attraction (HAT) field representation that encodes line segments using a closed-form 4D geometric vector field. The proposed HAWP consists of three sequential components empowered by end-to-end and HAT-driven designs: (1) generating a dense set of line segments from HAT fields and endpoint proposals from heatmaps, (2) binding the dense line segments to sparse endpoint proposals to produce initial wireframes, and (3) filtering false positive proposals through a novel endpoint-decoupled line-of-interest aligning (EPD LOIAlign) module that captures the co-occurrence between endpoint proposals and HAT fields for better verification. Thanks to our novel designs, HAWPv2 shows strong performance in fully supervised learning, while HAWPv3 excels in self-supervised learning, achieving superior repeatability scores and efficient training (24 GPU hours on a single GPU). Furthermore, HAWPv3 exhibits a promising potential for wireframe parsing in out-of-distribution images without providing ground truth labels of wireframes., Comment: Journal extension of arXiv:2003.01663; Accepted by IEEE TPAMI; Code is available at https://github.com/cherubicxn/hawp

Large-scale vision foundation models have made significant progress in visual tasks on natural images, with vision transformers being the primary choice due to their good scalability and representation ability. However, large-scale models in remote sensing (RS) have not yet been sufficiently explored. In this paper, we resort to plain vision transformers with about 100 million parameters and make the first attempt to propose large vision models tailored to RS tasks and investigate how such large models perform. To handle the large sizes and objects of arbitrary orientations in RS images, we propose a new rotated varied-size window attention to replace the original full attention in transformers, which can significantly reduce the computational cost and memory footprint while learning better object representation by extracting rich context from the generated diverse windows. Experiments on detection tasks show the superiority of our model over all state-of-the-art models, achieving 81.24% mAP on the DOTA-V1.0 dataset. The results of our models on downstream classification and segmentation tasks also show competitive performance compared to existing advanced methods. Further experiments show the advantages of our models in terms of computational complexity and data efficiency in transferring., Comment: Accepted by IEEE TGRS. The codes and models are released at https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/Remote-Sensing-RVSA

The fast development of self-supervised learning lowers the bar learning feature representation from massive unlabeled data and has triggered a series of research on change detection of remote sensing images. Challenges in adapting self-supervised learning from natural images classification to remote sensing images change detection arise from difference between the two tasks. The learned patch-level feature representations are not satisfying for the pixel-level precise change detection. In this paper, we proposed a novel pixel-level self-supervised hyperspectral spatial-spectral understanding network (HyperNet) to accomplish pixel-wise feature representation for effective hyperspectral change detection. Concretely, not patches but the whole images are fed into the network and the multi-temporal spatial-spectral features are compared pixel by pixel. Instead of processing the two-dimensional imaging space and spectral response dimension in hybrid style, a powerful spatial-spectral attention module is put forward to explore the spatial correlation and discriminative spectral features of multi-temporal hyperspectral images (HSIs), separately. Only the positive samples at the same location of bi-temporal HSIs are created and forced to be aligned, aiming at learning the spectral difference-invariant features. Moreover, a new similarity loss function named focal cosine is proposed to solve the problem of imbalanced easy and hard positive samples comparison, where the weights of those hard samples are enlarged and highlighted to promote the network training. Six hyperspectral datasets have been adopted to test the validity and generalization of proposed HyperNet. The extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of HyperNet over the state-of-the-art algorithms on downstream hyperspectral change detection tasks., Comment: 14 pages, 17 figures

Deep learning for change detection is one of the current hot topics in the field of remote sensing. However, most end-to-end networks are proposed for supervised change detection, and unsupervised change detection models depend on traditional pre-detection methods. Therefore, we proposed a fully convolutional change detection framework with generative adversarial network, to conclude unsupervised, weakly supervised, regional supervised, and fully supervised change detection tasks into one framework. A basic Unet segmentor is used to obtain change detection map, an image-to-image generator is implemented to model the spectral and spatial variation between multi-temporal images, and a discriminator for changed and unchanged is proposed for modeling the semantic changes in weakly and regional supervised change detection task. The iterative optimization of segmentor and generator can build an end-to-end network for unsupervised change detection, the adversarial process between segmentor and discriminator can provide the solutions for weakly and regional supervised change detection, the segmentor itself can be trained for fully supervised task. The experiments indicate the effectiveness of the propsed framework in unsupervised, weakly supervised and regional supervised change detection. This paper provides theorical definitions for unsupervised, weakly supervised and regional supervised change detection tasks, and shows great potentials in exploring end-to-end network for remote sensing change detection., Comment: 13 pages, 19 figures

Given an aerial image, aerial scene parsing (ASP) targets to interpret the semantic structure of the image content, e.g., by assigning a semantic label to every pixel of the image. With the popularization of data-driven methods, the past decades have witnessed promising progress on ASP by approaching the problem with the schemes of tile-level scene classification or segmentation-based image analysis, when using high-resolution aerial images. However, the former scheme often produces results with tile-wise boundaries, while the latter one needs to handle the complex modeling process from pixels to semantics, which often requires large-scale and well-annotated image samples with pixel-wise semantic labels. In this paper, we address these issues in ASP, with perspectives from tile-level scene classification to pixel-wise semantic labeling. Specifically, we first revisit aerial image interpretation by a literature review. We then present a large-scale scene classification dataset that contains one million aerial images termed Million-AID. With the presented dataset, we also report benchmarking experiments using classical convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Finally, we perform ASP by unifying the tile-level scene classification and object-based image analysis to achieve pixel-wise semantic labeling. Intensive experiments show that Million-AID is a challenging yet useful dataset, which can serve as a benchmark for evaluating newly developed algorithms. When transferring knowledge from Million-AID, fine-tuning CNN models pretrained on Million-AID perform consistently better than those pretrained ImageNet for aerial scene classification. Moreover, our designed hierarchical multi-task learning method achieves the state-of-the-art pixel-wise classification on the challenging GID, bridging the tile-level scene classification toward pixel-wise semantic labeling for aerial image interpretation.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have greatly contributed to the performance gains in semantic segmentation. Nevertheless, training DNNs generally requires large amounts of pixel-level labeled data, which is expensive and time-consuming to collect in practice. To mitigate the annotation burden, this paper proposes a self-ensembling generative adversarial network (SE-GAN) exploiting cross-domain data for semantic segmentation. In SE-GAN, a teacher network and a student network constitute a self-ensembling model for generating semantic segmentation maps, which together with a discriminator, forms a GAN. Despite its simplicity, we find SE-GAN can significantly boost the performance of adversarial training and enhance the stability of the model, the latter of which is a common barrier shared by most adversarial training-based methods. We theoretically analyze SE-GAN and provide an $\mathcal O(1/\sqrt{N})$ generalization bound ($N$ is the training sample size), which suggests controlling the discriminator's hypothesis complexity to enhance the generalizability. Accordingly, we choose a simple network as the discriminator. Extensive and systematic experiments in two standard settings demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches. The source code of our model is available online (https://github.com/YonghaoXu/SE-GAN).

Targeting at depicting land covers with pixel-wise semantic categories, semantic segmentation in remote sensing images needs to portray diverse distributions over vast geographical locations, which is difficult to be achieved by the homogeneous pixel-wise forward paths in the architectures of existing deep models. Although several algorithms have been designed to select pixel-wise adaptive forward paths for natural image analysis, it still lacks theoretical supports on how to obtain optimal selections. In this paper, we provide mathematical analyses in terms of the parameter optimization, which guides us to design a method called Hidden Path Selection Network (HPS-Net). With the help of hidden variables derived from an extra mini-branch, HPS-Net is able to tackle the inherent problem about inaccessible global optimums by adjusting the direct relationships between feature maps and pixel-wise path selections in existing algorithms, which we call hidden path selection. For the better training and evaluation, we further refine and expand the 5-class Gaofen Image Dataset (GID-5) to a new one with 15 land-cover categories, i.e., GID-15. The experimental results on both GID-5 and GID-15 demonstrate that the proposed modules can stably improve the performance of different deep structures, which validates the proposed mathematical analyses.

Characterized by tremendous spectral information, hyperspectral image is able to detect subtle changes and discriminate various change classes for change detection. The recent research works dominated by hyperspectral binary change detection, however, cannot provide fine change classes information. And most methods incorporating spectral unmixing for hyperspectral multiclass change detection (HMCD), yet suffer from the neglection of temporal correlation and error accumulation. In this study, we proposed an unsupervised Binary Change Guided hyperspectral multiclass change detection Network (BCG-Net) for HMCD, which aims at boosting the multiclass change detection result and unmixing result with the mature binary change detection approaches. In BCG-Net, a novel partial-siamese united-unmixing module is designed for multi-temporal spectral unmixing, and a groundbreaking temporal correlation constraint directed by the pseudo-labels of binary change detection result is developed to guide the unmixing process from the perspective of change detection, encouraging the abundance of the unchanged pixels more coherent and that of the changed pixels more accurate. Moreover, an innovative binary change detection rule is put forward to deal with the problem that traditional rule is susceptible to numerical values. The iterative optimization of the spectral unmixing process and the change detection process is proposed to eliminate the accumulated errors and bias from unmixing result to change detection result. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed BCG-Net could achieve comparative or even outstanding performance of multiclass change detection among the state-of-the-art approaches and gain better spectral unmixing results at the same time., Comment: 14 pages,17 figures

This paper studies the problem of multi-person pose estimation in a bottom-up fashion. With a new and strong observation that the localization issue of the center-offset formulation can be remedied in a local-window search scheme in an ideal situation, we propose a multi-person pose estimation approach, dubbed as LOGO-CAP, by learning the LOcal-GlObal Contextual Adaptation for human Pose. Specifically, our approach learns the keypoint attraction maps (KAMs) from the local keypoints expansion maps (KEMs) in small local windows in the first step, which are subsequently treated as dynamic convolutional kernels on the keypoints-focused global heatmaps for contextual adaptation, achieving accurate multi-person pose estimation. Our method is end-to-end trainable with near real-time inference speed in a single forward pass, obtaining state-of-the-art performance on the COCO keypoint benchmark for bottom-up human pose estimation. With the COCO trained model, our method also outperforms prior arts by a large margin on the challenging OCHuman dataset., Comment: To appear in CVPR 2022

Image fusion technology is widely used to fuse the complementary information between multi-source remote sensing images. Inspired by the frontier of deep learning, this paper first proposes a heterogeneous-integrated framework based on a novel deep residual cycle GAN. The proposed network consists of a forward fusion part and a backward degeneration feedback part. The forward part generates the desired fusion result from the various observations; the backward degeneration feedback part considers the imaging degradation process and regenerates the observations inversely from the fusion result. The proposed network can effectively fuse not only the homogeneous but also the heterogeneous information. In addition, for the first time, a heterogeneous-integrated fusion framework is proposed to simultaneously merge the complementary heterogeneous spatial, spectral and temporal information of multi-source heterogeneous observations. The proposed heterogeneous-integrated framework also provides a uniform mode that can complete various fusion tasks, including heterogeneous spatio-spectral fusion, spatio-temporal fusion, and heterogeneous spatio-spectral-temporal fusion. Experiments are conducted for two challenging scenarios of land cover changes and thick cloud coverage. Images from many remote sensing satellites, including MODIS, Landsat-8, Sentinel-1, and Sentinel-2, are utilized in the experiments. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This report summarizes the results of Learning to Understand Aerial Images (LUAI) 2021 challenge held on ICCV 2021, which focuses on object detection and semantic segmentation in aerial images. Using DOTA-v2.0 and GID-15 datasets, this challenge proposes three tasks for oriented object detection, horizontal object detection, and semantic segmentation of common categories in aerial images. This challenge received a total of 146 registrations on the three tasks. Through the challenge, we hope to draw attention from a wide range of communities and call for more efforts on the problems of learning to understand aerial images., Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, accepted by ICCVW 2021

For high spatial resolution (HSR) remote sensing images, bitemporal supervised learning always dominates change detection using many pairwise labeled bitemporal images. However, it is very expensive and time-consuming to pairwise label large-scale bitemporal HSR remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose single-temporal supervised learning (STAR) for change detection from a new perspective of exploiting object changes in unpaired images as supervisory signals. STAR enables us to train a high-accuracy change detector only using \textbf{unpaired} labeled images and generalize to real-world bitemporal images. To evaluate the effectiveness of STAR, we design a simple yet effective change detector called ChangeStar, which can reuse any deep semantic segmentation architecture by the ChangeMixin module. The comprehensive experimental results show that ChangeStar outperforms the baseline with a large margin under single-temporal supervision and achieves superior performance under bitemporal supervision. Code is available at https://github.com/Z-Zheng/ChangeStar, Comment: ICCV 2021

In the fields of image restoration and image fusion, model-driven methods and data-driven methods are the two representative frameworks. However, both approaches have their respective advantages and disadvantages. The model-driven methods consider the imaging mechanism, which is deterministic and theoretically reasonable; however, they cannot easily model complicated nonlinear problems. The data-driven methods have a stronger prior knowledge learning capability for huge data, especially for nonlinear statistical features; however, the interpretability of the networks is poor, and they are over-dependent on training data. In this paper, we systematically investigate the coupling of model-driven and data-driven methods, which has rarely been considered in the remote sensing image restoration and fusion communities. We are the first to summarize the coupling approaches into the following three categories: 1) data-driven and model-driven cascading methods; 2) variational models with embedded learning; and 3) model-constrained network learning methods. The typical existing and potential coupling methods for remote sensing image restoration and fusion are introduced with application examples. This paper also gives some new insights into the potential future directions, in terms of both methods and applications.