arXiv subjects

Gui-Song Xia

Publications and source records attributed to Gui-Song Xia.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

An Empirical Study of Remote Sensing Pretraining

Deep learning has largely reshaped remote sensing (RS) research for aerial image understanding and made a great success. Nevertheless, most of the existing deep models are initialized with the ImageNet pretrained weights. Since natural images inevitably present a large domain gap relative to aerial images, probably limiting the finetuning performance on downstream aerial scene tasks. This issue motivates us to conduct an empirical study of remote sensing pretraining (RSP) on aerial images. To this end, we train different networks from scratch with the help of the largest RS scene recognition dataset up to now -- MillionAID, to obtain a series of RS pretrained backbones, including both convolutional neural networks (CNN) and vision transformers such as Swin and ViTAE, which have shown promising performance on computer vision tasks. Then, we investigate the impact of RSP on representative downstream tasks including scene recognition, semantic segmentation, object detection, and change detection using these CNN and vision transformer backbones. Empirical study shows that RSP can help deliver distinctive performances in scene recognition tasks and in perceiving RS related semantics such as "Bridge" and "Airplane". We also find that, although RSP mitigates the data discrepancies of traditional ImageNet pretraining on RS images, it may still suffer from task discrepancies, where downstream tasks require different representations from scene recognition tasks. These findings call for further research efforts on both large-scale pretraining datasets and effective pretraining methods. The codes and pretrained models will be released at https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/ViTAE-Transformer-Remote-Sensing.

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arXiv2023

Self-Supervised Scene Dynamic Recovery from Rolling Shutter Images and Events

Scene Dynamic Recovery (SDR) by inverting distorted Rolling Shutter (RS) images to an undistorted high frame-rate Global Shutter (GS) video is a severely ill-posed problem due to the missing temporal dynamic information in both RS intra-frame scanlines and inter-frame exposures, particularly when prior knowledge about camera/object motions is unavailable. Commonly used artificial assumptions on scenes/motions and data-specific characteristics are prone to producing sub-optimal solutions in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose an event-based SDR network within a self-supervised learning paradigm, i.e., SelfUnroll. We leverage the extremely high temporal resolution of event cameras to provide accurate inter/intra-frame dynamic information. Specifically, an Event-based Inter/intra-frame Compensator (E-IC) is proposed to predict the per-pixel dynamic between arbitrary time intervals, including the temporal transition and spatial translation. Exploring connections in terms of RS-RS, RS-GS, and GS-RS, we explicitly formulate mutual constraints with the proposed E-IC, resulting in supervisions without ground-truth GS images. Extensive evaluations over synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art and shows remarkable performance for event-based RS2GS inversion in real-world scenarios. The dataset and code are available at https://w3un.github.io/selfunroll/.

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arXiv2023

Dynamic Coarse-to-Fine Learning for Oriented Tiny Object Detection

Detecting arbitrarily oriented tiny objects poses intense challenges to existing detectors, especially for label assignment. Despite the exploration of adaptive label assignment in recent oriented object detectors, the extreme geometry shape and limited feature of oriented tiny objects still induce severe mismatch and imbalance issues. Specifically, the position prior, positive sample feature, and instance are mismatched, and the learning of extreme-shaped objects is biased and unbalanced due to little proper feature supervision. To tackle these issues, we propose a dynamic prior along with the coarse-to-fine assigner, dubbed DCFL. For one thing, we model the prior, label assignment, and object representation all in a dynamic manner to alleviate the mismatch issue. For another, we leverage the coarse prior matching and finer posterior constraint to dynamically assign labels, providing appropriate and relatively balanced supervision for diverse instances. Extensive experiments on six datasets show substantial improvements to the baseline. Notably, we obtain the state-of-the-art performance for one-stage detectors on the DOTA-v1.5, DOTA-v2.0, and DIOR-R datasets under single-scale training and testing. Codes are available at https://github.com/Chasel-Tsui/mmrotate-dcfl.

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arXiv2023

Enabling Country-Scale Land Cover Mapping with Meter-Resolution Satellite Imagery

High-resolution satellite images can provide abundant, detailed spatial information for land cover classification, which is particularly important for studying the complicated built environment. However, due to the complex land cover patterns, the costly training sample collections, and the severe distribution shifts of satellite imageries, few studies have applied high-resolution images to land cover mapping in detailed categories at large scale. To fill this gap, we present a large-scale land cover dataset, Five-Billion-Pixels. It contains more than 5 billion labeled pixels of 150 high-resolution Gaofen-2 (4 m) satellite images, annotated in a 24-category system covering artificial-constructed, agricultural, and natural classes. In addition, we propose a deep-learning-based unsupervised domain adaptation approach that can transfer classification models trained on labeled dataset (referred to as the source domain) to unlabeled data (referred to as the target domain) for large-scale land cover mapping. Specifically, we introduce an end-to-end Siamese network employing dynamic pseudo-label assignment and class balancing strategy to perform adaptive domain joint learning. To validate the generalizability of our dataset and the proposed approach across different sensors and different geographical regions, we carry out land cover mapping on five megacities in China and six cities in other five Asian countries severally using: PlanetScope (3 m), Gaofen-1 (8 m), and Sentinel-2 (10 m) satellite images. Over a total study area of 60,000 square kilometers, the experiments show promising results even though the input images are entirely unlabeled. The proposed approach, trained with the Five-Billion-Pixels dataset, enables high-quality and detailed land cover mapping across the whole country of China and some other Asian countries at meter-resolution.

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arXiv2023

Recovering Continuous Scene Dynamics from A Single Blurry Image with Events

This paper aims at demystifying a single motion-blurred image with events and revealing temporally continuous scene dynamics encrypted behind motion blurs. To achieve this end, an Implicit Video Function (IVF) is learned to represent a single motion blurred image with concurrent events, enabling the latent sharp image restoration of arbitrary timestamps in the range of imaging exposures. Specifically, a dual attention transformer is proposed to efficiently leverage merits from both modalities, i.e., the high temporal resolution of event features and the smoothness of image features, alleviating temporal ambiguities while suppressing the event noise. The proposed network is trained only with the supervision of ground-truth images of limited referenced timestamps. Motion- and texture-guided supervisions are employed simultaneously to enhance restorations of the non-referenced timestamps and improve the overall sharpness. Experiments on synthetic, semi-synthetic, and real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in terms of both objective PSNR and SSIM measurements and subjective evaluations.

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arXiv2023

Level-S$^2$fM: Structure from Motion on Neural Level Set of Implicit Surfaces

This paper presents a neural incremental Structure-from-Motion (SfM) approach, Level-S$^2$fM, which estimates the camera poses and scene geometry from a set of uncalibrated images by learning coordinate MLPs for the implicit surfaces and the radiance fields from the established keypoint correspondences. Our novel formulation poses some new challenges due to inevitable two-view and few-view configurations in the incremental SfM pipeline, which complicates the optimization of coordinate MLPs for volumetric neural rendering with unknown camera poses. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that the strong inductive basis conveying in the 2D correspondences is promising to tackle those challenges by exploiting the relationship between the ray sampling schemes. Based on this, we revisit the pipeline of incremental SfM and renew the key components, including two-view geometry initialization, the camera poses registration, the 3D points triangulation, and Bundle Adjustment, with a fresh perspective based on neural implicit surfaces. By unifying the scene geometry in small MLP networks through coordinate MLPs, our Level-S$^2$fM treats the zero-level set of the implicit surface as an informative top-down regularization to manage the reconstructed 3D points, reject the outliers in correspondences via querying SDF, and refine the estimated geometries by NBA (Neural BA). Not only does our Level-S$^2$fM lead to promising results on camera pose estimation and scene geometry reconstruction, but it also shows a promising way for neural implicit rendering without knowing camera extrinsic beforehand.

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arXiv2023

Learning to Super-Resolve Blurry Images with Events

Super-Resolution from a single motion Blurred image (SRB) is a severely ill-posed problem due to the joint degradation of motion blurs and low spatial resolution. In this paper, we employ events to alleviate the burden of SRB and propose an Event-enhanced SRB (E-SRB) algorithm, which can generate a sequence of sharp and clear images with High Resolution (HR) from a single blurry image with Low Resolution (LR). To achieve this end, we formulate an event-enhanced degeneration model to consider the low spatial resolution, motion blurs, and event noises simultaneously. We then build an event-enhanced Sparse Learning Network (eSL-Net++) upon a dual sparse learning scheme where both events and intensity frames are modeled with sparse representations. Furthermore, we propose an event shuffle-and-merge scheme to extend the single-frame SRB to the sequence-frame SRB without any additional training process. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed eSL-Net++ outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Datasets, codes, and more results are available at https://github.com/ShinyWang33/eSL-Net-Plusplus.

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arXiv2023

Few-Shot Object Detection via Variational Feature Aggregation

As few-shot object detectors are often trained with abundant base samples and fine-tuned on few-shot novel examples,the learned models are usually biased to base classes and sensitive to the variance of novel examples. To address this issue, we propose a meta-learning framework with two novel feature aggregation schemes. More precisely, we first present a Class-Agnostic Aggregation (CAA) method, where the query and support features can be aggregated regardless of their categories. The interactions between different classes encourage class-agnostic representations and reduce confusion between base and novel classes. Based on the CAA, we then propose a Variational Feature Aggregation (VFA) method, which encodes support examples into class-level support features for robust feature aggregation. We use a variational autoencoder to estimate class distributions and sample variational features from distributions that are more robust to the variance of support examples. Besides, we decouple classification and regression tasks so that VFA is performed on the classification branch without affecting object localization. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and COCO demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms a strong baseline (up to 16\%) and previous state-of-the-art methods (4\% in average). Code will be available at: \url{https://github.com/csuhan/VFA}

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arXiv2023

Detecting Building Changes with Off-Nadir Aerial Images

The tilted viewing nature of the off-nadir aerial images brings severe challenges to the building change detection (BCD) problem: the mismatch of the nearby buildings and the semantic ambiguity of the building facades. To tackle these challenges, we present a multi-task guided change detection network model, named as MTGCD-Net. The proposed model approaches the specific BCD problem by designing three auxiliary tasks, including: (1) a pixel-wise classification task to predict the roofs and facades of buildings; (2) an auxiliary task for learning the roof-to-footprint offsets of each building to account for the misalignment between building roof instances; and (3) an auxiliary task for learning the identical roof matching flow between bi-temporal aerial images to tackle the building roof mismatch problem. These auxiliary tasks provide indispensable and complementary building parsing and matching information. The predictions of the auxiliary tasks are finally fused to the main building change detection branch with a multi-modal distillation module. To train and test models for the BCD problem with off-nadir aerial images, we create a new benchmark dataset, named BANDON. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance over the previous state-of-the-art competitors.

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arXiv2022

Learning to See Through with Events

Although synthetic aperture imaging (SAI) can achieve the seeing-through effect by blurring out off-focus foreground occlusions while recovering in-focus occluded scenes from multi-view images, its performance is often deteriorated by dense occlusions and extreme lighting conditions. To address the problem, this paper presents an Event-based SAI (E-SAI) method by relying on the asynchronous events with extremely low latency and high dynamic range acquired by an event camera. Specifically, the collected events are first refocused by a Refocus-Net module to align in-focus events while scattering out off-focus ones. Following that, a hybrid network composed of spiking neural networks (SNNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is proposed to encode the spatio-temporal information from the refocused events and reconstruct a visual image of the occluded targets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed E-SAI method can achieve remarkable performance in dealing with very dense occlusions and extreme lighting conditions and produce high-quality images from pure events. Codes and datasets are available at https://dvs-whu.cn/projects/esai/.

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arXiv2022

Detecting Line Segments in Motion-blurred Images with Events

Making line segment detectors more reliable under motion blurs is one of the most important challenges for practical applications, such as visual SLAM and 3D reconstruction. Existing line segment detection methods face severe performance degradation for accurately detecting and locating line segments when motion blur occurs. While event data shows strong complementary characteristics to images for minimal blur and edge awareness at high-temporal resolution, potentially beneficial for reliable line segment recognition. To robustly detect line segments over motion blurs, we propose to leverage the complementary information of images and events. To achieve this, we first design a general frame-event feature fusion network to extract and fuse the detailed image textures and low-latency event edges, which consists of a channel-attention-based shallow fusion module and a self-attention-based dual hourglass module. We then utilize two state-of-the-art wireframe parsing networks to detect line segments on the fused feature map. Besides, we contribute a synthetic and a realistic dataset for line segment detection, i.e., FE-Wireframe and FE-Blurframe, with pairwise motion-blurred images and events. Extensive experiments on both datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. When tested on the real dataset, our method achieves 63.3% mean structural average precision (msAP) with the model pre-trained on the FE-Wireframe and fine-tuned on the FE-Blurframe, improved by 32.6 and 11.3 points compared with models trained on synthetic only and real only, respectively. The codes, datasets, and trained models are released at: https://levenberg.github.io/FE-LSD

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arXiv2022

RFLA: Gaussian Receptive Field based Label Assignment for Tiny Object Detection

Detecting tiny objects is one of the main obstacles hindering the development of object detection. The performance of generic object detectors tends to drastically deteriorate on tiny object detection tasks. In this paper, we point out that either box prior in the anchor-based detector or point prior in the anchor-free detector is sub-optimal for tiny objects. Our key observation is that the current anchor-based or anchor-free label assignment paradigms will incur many outlier tiny-sized ground truth samples, leading to detectors imposing less focus on the tiny objects. To this end, we propose a Gaussian Receptive Field based Label Assignment (RFLA) strategy for tiny object detection. Specifically, RFLA first utilizes the prior information that the feature receptive field follows Gaussian distribution. Then, instead of assigning samples with IoU or center sampling strategy, a new Receptive Field Distance (RFD) is proposed to directly measure the similarity between the Gaussian receptive field and ground truth. Considering that the IoU-threshold based and center sampling strategy are skewed to large objects, we further design a Hierarchical Label Assignment (HLA) module based on RFD to achieve balanced learning for tiny objects. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Especially, our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors with 4.0 AP points on the AI-TOD dataset. Codes are available at https://github.com/Chasel-Tsui/mmdet-rfla

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arXiv2022

Anomaly Detection in Aerial Videos with Transformers

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely applied for purposes of inspection, search, and rescue operations by the virtue of low-cost, large-coverage, real-time, and high-resolution data acquisition capacities. Massive volumes of aerial videos are produced in these processes, in which normal events often account for an overwhelming proportion. It is extremely difficult to localize and extract abnormal events containing potentially valuable information from long video streams manually. Therefore, we are dedicated to developing anomaly detection methods to solve this issue. In this paper, we create a new dataset, named DroneAnomaly, for anomaly detection in aerial videos. This dataset provides 37 training video sequences and 22 testing video sequences from 7 different realistic scenes with various anomalous events. There are 87,488 color video frames (51,635 for training and 35,853 for testing) with the size of $640 \times 640$ at 30 frames per second. Based on this dataset, we evaluate existing methods and offer a benchmark for this task. Furthermore, we present a new baseline model, ANomaly Detection with Transformers (ANDT), which treats consecutive video frames as a sequence of tubelets, utilizes a Transformer encoder to learn feature representations from the sequence, and leverages a decoder to predict the next frame. Our network models normality in the training phase and identifies an event with unpredictable temporal dynamics as an anomaly in the test phase. Moreover, To comprehensively evaluate the performance of our proposed method, we use not only our Drone-Anomaly dataset but also another dataset. We will make our dataset and code publicly available. A demo video is available at https://youtu.be/ancczYryOBY. We make our dataset and code publicly available .

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arXiv2022

FuTH-Net: Fusing Temporal Relations and Holistic Features for Aerial Video Classification

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are now widely applied to data acquisition due to its low cost and fast mobility. With the increasing volume of aerial videos, the demand for automatically parsing these videos is surging. To achieve this, current researches mainly focus on extracting a holistic feature with convolutions along both spatial and temporal dimensions. However, these methods are limited by small temporal receptive fields and cannot adequately capture long-term temporal dependencies which are important for describing complicated dynamics. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network, termed FuTH-Net, to model not only holistic features, but also temporal relations for aerial video classification. Furthermore, the holistic features are refined by the multi-scale temporal relations in a novel fusion module for yielding more discriminative video representations. More specially, FuTH-Net employs a two-pathway architecture: (1) a holistic representation pathway to learn a general feature of both frame appearances and shortterm temporal variations and (2) a temporal relation pathway to capture multi-scale temporal relations across arbitrary frames, providing long-term temporal dependencies. Afterwards, a novel fusion module is proposed to spatiotemporal integrate the two features learned from the two pathways. Our model is evaluated on two aerial video classification datasets, ERA and Drone-Action, and achieves the state-of-the-art results. This demonstrates its effectiveness and good generalization capacity across different recognition tasks (event classification and human action recognition). To facilitate further research, we release the code at https://gitlab.lrz.de/ai4eo/reasoning/futh-net.

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arXiv2022

Transformers in Remote Sensing: A Survey

Deep learning-based algorithms have seen a massive popularity in different areas of remote sensing image analysis over the past decade. Recently, transformers-based architectures, originally introduced in natural language processing, have pervaded computer vision field where the self-attention mechanism has been utilized as a replacement to the popular convolution operator for capturing long-range dependencies. Inspired by recent advances in computer vision, remote sensing community has also witnessed an increased exploration of vision transformers for a diverse set of tasks. Although a number of surveys have focused on transformers in computer vision in general, to the best of our knowledge we are the first to present a systematic review of recent advances based on transformers in remote sensing. Our survey covers more than 60 recent transformers-based methods for different remote sensing problems in sub-areas of remote sensing: very high-resolution (VHR), hyperspectral (HSI) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. We conclude the survey by discussing different challenges and open issues of transformers in remote sensing. Additionally, we intend to frequently update and maintain the latest transformers in remote sensing papers with their respective code at: https://github.com/VIROBO-15/Transformer-in-Remote-Sensing

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arXiv2022

HoW-3D: Holistic 3D Wireframe Perception from a Single Image

This paper studies the problem of holistic 3D wireframe perception (HoW-3D), a new task of perceiving both the visible 3D wireframes and the invisible ones from single-view 2D images. As the non-front surfaces of an object cannot be directly observed in a single view, estimating the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) geometries in HoW-3D is a fundamentally challenging problem and remains open in computer vision. We study the problem of HoW-3D by proposing an ABC-HoW benchmark, which is created on top of CAD models sourced from the ABC-dataset with 12k single-view images and the corresponding holistic 3D wireframe models. With our large-scale ABC-HoW benchmark available, we present a novel Deep Spatial Gestalt (DSG) model to learn the visible junctions and line segments as the basis and then infer the NLOS 3D structures from the visible cues by following the Gestalt principles of human vision systems. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our DSG model performs very well in inferring the holistic 3D wireframes from single-view images. Compared with the strong baseline methods, our DSG model outperforms the previous wireframe detectors in detecting the invisible line geometry in single-view images and is even very competitive with prior arts that take high-fidelity PointCloud as inputs on reconstructing 3D wireframes.

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arXiv2022

GLF-CR: SAR-Enhanced Cloud Removal with Global-Local Fusion

The challenge of the cloud removal task can be alleviated with the aid of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images that can penetrate cloud cover. However, the large domain gap between optical and SAR images as well as the severe speckle noise of SAR images may cause significant interference in SAR-based cloud removal, resulting in performance degeneration. In this paper, we propose a novel global-local fusion based cloud removal (GLF-CR) algorithm to leverage the complementary information embedded in SAR images. Exploiting the power of SAR information to promote cloud removal entails two aspects. The first, global fusion, guides the relationship among all local optical windows to maintain the structure of the recovered region consistent with the remaining cloud-free regions. The second, local fusion, transfers complementary information embedded in the SAR image that corresponds to cloudy areas to generate reliable texture details of the missing regions, and uses dynamic filtering to alleviate the performance degradation caused by speckle noise. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that the proposed algorithm can yield high quality cloud-free images and outperform state-of-the-art cloud removal algorithms with a gain about 1.7dB in terms of PSNR on SEN12MS-CR dataset.

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arXiv2022

OmniCity: Omnipotent City Understanding with Multi-level and Multi-view Images

This paper presents OmniCity, a new dataset for omnipotent city understanding from multi-level and multi-view images. More precisely, the OmniCity contains multi-view satellite images as well as street-level panorama and mono-view images, constituting over 100K pixel-wise annotated images that are well-aligned and collected from 25K geo-locations in New York City. To alleviate the substantial pixel-wise annotation efforts, we propose an efficient street-view image annotation pipeline that leverages the existing label maps of satellite view and the transformation relations between different views (satellite, panorama, and mono-view). With the new OmniCity dataset, we provide benchmarks for a variety of tasks including building footprint extraction, height estimation, and building plane/instance/fine-grained segmentation. Compared with the existing multi-level and multi-view benchmarks, OmniCity contains a larger number of images with richer annotation types and more views, provides more benchmark results of state-of-the-art models, and introduces a novel task for fine-grained building instance segmentation on street-level panorama images. Moreover, OmniCity provides new problem settings for existing tasks, such as cross-view image matching, synthesis, segmentation, detection, etc., and facilitates the developing of new methods for large-scale city understanding, reconstruction, and simulation. The OmniCity dataset as well as the benchmarks will be available at https://city-super.github.io/omnicity.

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