arXiv subjects

Gui-Song Xia

Publications and source records attributed to Gui-Song Xia.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Align Deep Features for Oriented Object Detection

The past decade has witnessed significant progress on detecting objects in aerial images that are often distributed with large scale variations and arbitrary orientations. However most of existing methods rely on heuristically defined anchors with different scales, angles and aspect ratios and usually suffer from severe misalignment between anchor boxes and axis-aligned convolutional features, which leads to the common inconsistency between the classification score and localization accuracy. To address this issue, we propose a Single-shot Alignment Network (S$^2$A-Net) consisting of two modules: a Feature Alignment Module (FAM) and an Oriented Detection Module (ODM). The FAM can generate high-quality anchors with an Anchor Refinement Network and adaptively align the convolutional features according to the anchor boxes with a novel Alignment Convolution. The ODM first adopts active rotating filters to encode the orientation information and then produces orientation-sensitive and orientation-invariant features to alleviate the inconsistency between classification score and localization accuracy. Besides, we further explore the approach to detect objects in large-size images, which leads to a better trade-off between speed and accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on two commonly used aerial objects datasets (i.e., DOTA and HRSC2016) while keeping high efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/csuhan/s2anet.

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arXiv2021

Unmixing Convolutional Features for Crisp Edge Detection

This paper presents a context-aware tracing strategy (CATS) for crisp edge detection with deep edge detectors, based on an observation that the localization ambiguity of deep edge detectors is mainly caused by the mixing phenomenon of convolutional neural networks: feature mixing in edge classification and side mixing during fusing side predictions. The CATS consists of two modules: a novel tracing loss that performs feature unmixing by tracing boundaries for better side edge learning, and a context-aware fusion block that tackles the side mixing by aggregating the complementary merits of learned side edges. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed CATS can be integrated into modern deep edge detectors to improve localization accuracy. With the vanilla VGG16 backbone, in terms of BSDS500 dataset, our CATS improves the F-measure (ODS) of the RCF and BDCN deep edge detectors by 12% and 6% respectively when evaluating without using the morphological non-maximal suppression scheme for edge detection.

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arXiv2021

Semantic Change Detection with Asymmetric Siamese Networks

Given two multi-temporal aerial images, semantic change detection aims to locate the land-cover variations and identify their change types with pixel-wise boundaries. This problem is vital in many earth vision related tasks, such as precise urban planning and natural resource management. Existing state-of-the-art algorithms mainly identify the changed pixels by applying homogeneous operations on each input image and comparing the extracted features. However, in changed regions, totally different land-cover distributions often require heterogeneous features extraction procedures w.r.t each input. In this paper, we present an asymmetric siamese network (ASN) to locate and identify semantic changes through feature pairs obtained from modules of widely different structures, which involve areas of various sizes and apply different quantities of parameters to factor in the discrepancy across different land-cover distributions. To better train and evaluate our model, we create a large-scale well-annotated SEmantic Change detectiON Dataset (SECOND), while an Adaptive Threshold Learning (ATL) module and a Separated Kappa (SeK) coefficient are proposed to alleviate the influences of label imbalance in model training and evaluation. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can stably outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms with different encoder backbones.

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arXiv2021

On Creating Benchmark Dataset for Aerial Image Interpretation: Reviews, Guidances and Million-AID

The past years have witnessed great progress on remote sensing (RS) image interpretation and its wide applications. With RS images becoming more accessible than ever before, there is an increasing demand for the automatic interpretation of these images. In this context, the benchmark datasets serve as essential prerequisites for developing and testing intelligent interpretation algorithms. After reviewing existing benchmark datasets in the research community of RS image interpretation, this article discusses the problem of how to efficiently prepare a suitable benchmark dataset for RS image interpretation. Specifically, we first analyze the current challenges of developing intelligent algorithms for RS image interpretation with bibliometric investigations. We then present the general guidances on creating benchmark datasets in efficient manners. Following the presented guidances, we also provide an example on building RS image dataset, i.e., Million-AID, a new large-scale benchmark dataset containing a million instances for RS image scene classification. Several challenges and perspectives in RS image annotation are finally discussed to facilitate the research in benchmark dataset construction. We do hope this paper will provide the RS community an overall perspective on constructing large-scale and practical image datasets for further research, especially data-driven ones.

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arXiv2021

Event-based Synthetic Aperture Imaging with a Hybrid Network

Synthetic aperture imaging (SAI) is able to achieve the see through effect by blurring out the off-focus foreground occlusions and reconstructing the in-focus occluded targets from multi-view images. However, very dense occlusions and extreme lighting conditions may bring significant disturbances to the SAI based on conventional frame-based cameras, leading to performance degeneration. To address these problems, we propose a novel SAI system based on the event camera which can produce asynchronous events with extremely low latency and high dynamic range. Thus, it can eliminate the interference of dense occlusions by measuring with almost continuous views, and simultaneously tackle the over/under exposure problems. To reconstruct the occluded targets, we propose a hybrid encoder-decoder network composed of spiking neural networks (SNNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In the hybrid network, the spatio-temporal information of the collected events is first encoded by SNN layers, and then transformed to the visual image of the occluded targets by a style-transfer CNN decoder. Through experiments, the proposed method shows remarkable performance in dealing with very dense occlusions and extreme lighting conditions, and high quality visual images can be reconstructed using pure event data.

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arXiv2021

Deep Graph Matching under Quadratic Constraint

Recently, deep learning based methods have demonstrated promising results on the graph matching problem, by relying on the descriptive capability of deep features extracted on graph nodes. However, one main limitation with existing deep graph matching (DGM) methods lies in their ignorance of explicit constraint of graph structures, which may lead the model to be trapped into local minimum in training. In this paper, we propose to explicitly formulate pairwise graph structures as a \textbf{quadratic constraint} incorporated into the DGM framework. The quadratic constraint minimizes the pairwise structural discrepancy between graphs, which can reduce the ambiguities brought by only using the extracted CNN features. Moreover, we present a differentiable implementation to the quadratic constrained-optimization such that it is compatible with the unconstrained deep learning optimizer. To give more precise and proper supervision, a well-designed false matching loss against class imbalance is proposed, which can better penalize the false negatives and false positives with less overfitting. Exhaustive experiments demonstrate that our method competitive performance on real-world datasets.

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arXiv2021

ReDet: A Rotation-equivariant Detector for Aerial Object Detection

Recently, object detection in aerial images has gained much attention in computer vision. Different from objects in natural images, aerial objects are often distributed with arbitrary orientation. Therefore, the detector requires more parameters to encode the orientation information, which are often highly redundant and inefficient. Moreover, as ordinary CNNs do not explicitly model the orientation variation, large amounts of rotation augmented data is needed to train an accurate object detector. In this paper, we propose a Rotation-equivariant Detector (ReDet) to address these issues, which explicitly encodes rotation equivariance and rotation invariance. More precisely, we incorporate rotation-equivariant networks into the detector to extract rotation-equivariant features, which can accurately predict the orientation and lead to a huge reduction of model size. Based on the rotation-equivariant features, we also present Rotation-invariant RoI Align (RiRoI Align), which adaptively extracts rotation-invariant features from equivariant features according to the orientation of RoI. Extensive experiments on several challenging aerial image datasets DOTA-v1.0, DOTA-v1.5 and HRSC2016, show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the task of aerial object detection. Compared with previous best results, our ReDet gains 1.2, 3.5 and 2.6 mAP on DOTA-v1.0, DOTA-v1.5 and HRSC2016 respectively while reducing the number of parameters by 60\% (313 Mb vs. 121 Mb). The code is available at: \url{https://github.com/csuhan/ReDet}.

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arXiv2021

Bidirectional Multi-scale Attention Networks for Semantic Segmentation of Oblique UAV Imagery

Semantic segmentation for aerial platforms has been one of the fundamental scene understanding task for the earth observation. Most of the semantic segmentation research focused on scenes captured in nadir view, in which objects have relatively smaller scale variation compared with scenes captured in oblique view. The huge scale variation of objects in oblique images limits the performance of deep neural networks (DNN) that process images in a single scale fashion. In order to tackle the scale variation issue, in this paper, we propose the novel bidirectional multi-scale attention networks, which fuse features from multiple scales bidirectionally for more adaptive and effective feature extraction. The experiments are conducted on the UAVid2020 dataset and have shown the effectiveness of our method. Our model achieved the state-of-the-art (SOTA) result with a mean intersection over union (mIoU) score of 70.80%.

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arXiv2020

Mixed Noise Removal with Pareto Prior

Denoising images contaminated by the mixture of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and impulse noise (IN) is an essential but challenging problem. The presence of impulsive disturbances inevitably affects the distribution of noises and thus largely degrades the performance of traditional AWGN denoisers. Existing methods target to compensate the effects of IN by introducing a weighting matrix, which, however, is lack of proper priori and thus hard to be accurately estimated. To address this problem, we exploit the Pareto distribution as the priori of the weighting matrix, based on which an accurate and robust weight estimator is proposed for mixed noise removal. Particularly, a relatively small portion of pixels are assumed to be contaminated with IN, which should have weights with small values and then be penalized out. This phenomenon can be properly described by the Pareto distribution of type 1. Therefore, armed with the Pareto distribution, we formulate the problem of mixed noise removal in the Bayesian framework, where nonlocal self-similarity priori is further exploited by adopting nonlocal low rank approximation. Compared to existing methods, the proposed method can estimate the weighting matrix adaptively, accurately, and robust for different level of noises, thus can boost the denoising performance. Experimental results on widely used image datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method to the state-of-the-arts.

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arXiv2020

Event Enhanced High-Quality Image Recovery

With extremely high temporal resolution, event cameras have a large potential for robotics and computer vision. However, their asynchronous imaging mechanism often aggravates the measurement sensitivity to noises and brings a physical burden to increase the image spatial resolution. To recover high-quality intensity images, one should address both denoising and super-resolution problems for event cameras. Since events depict brightness changes, with the enhanced degeneration model by the events, the clear and sharp high-resolution latent images can be recovered from the noisy, blurry and low-resolution intensity observations. Exploiting the framework of sparse learning, the events and the low-resolution intensity observations can be jointly considered. Based on this, we propose an explainable network, an event-enhanced sparse learning network (eSL-Net), to recover the high-quality images from event cameras. After training with a synthetic dataset, the proposed eSL-Net can largely improve the performance of the state-of-the-art by 7-12 dB. Furthermore, without additional training process, the proposed eSL-Net can be easily extended to generate continuous frames with frame-rate as high as the events.

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arXiv2020

Implicit Euler ODE Networks for Single-Image Dehazing

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been applied for image dehazing tasks, where the residual network (ResNet) is often adopted as the basic component to avoid the vanishing gradient problem. Recently, many works indicate that the ResNet can be considered as the explicit Euler forward approximation of an ordinary differential equation (ODE). In this paper, we extend the explicit forward approximation to the implicit backward counterpart, which can be realized via a recursive neural network, named IM-block. Given that, we propose an efficient end-to-end multi-level implicit network (MI-Net) for the single image dehazing problem. Moreover, multi-level fusing (MLF) mechanism and residual channel attention block (RCA-block) are adopted to boost performance of our network. Experiments on several dehazing benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

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arXiv2020

X-ModalNet: A Semi-Supervised Deep Cross-Modal Network for Classification of Remote Sensing Data

This paper addresses the problem of semi-supervised transfer learning with limited cross-modality data in remote sensing. A large amount of multi-modal earth observation images, such as multispectral imagery (MSI) or synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, are openly available on a global scale, enabling parsing global urban scenes through remote sensing imagery. However, their ability in identifying materials (pixel-wise classification) remains limited, due to the noisy collection environment and poor discriminative information as well as limited number of well-annotated training images. To this end, we propose a novel cross-modal deep-learning framework, called X-ModalNet, with three well-designed modules: self-adversarial module, interactive learning module, and label propagation module, by learning to transfer more discriminative information from a small-scale hyperspectral image (HSI) into the classification task using a large-scale MSI or SAR data. Significantly, X-ModalNet generalizes well, owing to propagating labels on an updatable graph constructed by high-level features on the top of the network, yielding semi-supervised cross-modality learning. We evaluate X-ModalNet on two multi-modal remote sensing datasets (HSI-MSI and HSI-SAR) and achieve a significant improvement in comparison with several state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2020

Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification Meets Deep Learning: Challenges, Methods, Benchmarks, and Opportunities

Remote sensing image scene classification, which aims at labeling remote sensing images with a set of semantic categories based on their contents, has broad applications in a range of fields. Propelled by the powerful feature learning capabilities of deep neural networks, remote sensing image scene classification driven by deep learning has drawn remarkable attention and achieved significant breakthroughs. However, to the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive review of recent achievements regarding deep learning for scene classification of remote sensing images is still lacking. Considering the rapid evolution of this field, this paper provides a systematic survey of deep learning methods for remote sensing image scene classification by covering more than 160 papers. To be specific, we discuss the main challenges of remote sensing image scene classification and survey (1) Autoencoder-based remote sensing image scene classification methods, (2) Convolutional Neural Network-based remote sensing image scene classification methods, and (3) Generative Adversarial Network-based remote sensing image scene classification methods. In addition, we introduce the benchmarks used for remote sensing image scene classification and summarize the performance of more than two dozen of representative algorithms on three commonly-used benchmark data sets. Finally, we discuss the promising opportunities for further research.

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arXiv2020

Single Image Deraining with Continuous Rain Density Estimation

Single image deraining (SIDR) often suffers from over/under deraining due to the nonuniformity of rain densities and the variety of raindrop scales. In this paper, we propose a \textbf{\it co}ntinuous \textbf{\it de}nsity guided network (CODE-Net) for SIDR. Particularly, it is composed of { a rain {\color{black}streak} extractor and a denoiser}, where the convolutional sparse coding (CSC) is exploited to filter out noises from the extracted rain streaks. Inspired by the reweighted iterative soft-threshold for CSC, we address the problem of continuous rain density estimation by learning the weights with channel attention blocks from sparse codes. We further {\color{black}develop} a multiscale strategy to depict rain streaks appearing at different scales. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the superiority of our methods over recent {\color{black}state of the arts}, in terms of both quantitative and qualitative results. Additionally, instead of quantizing rain density with several levels, our CODE-Net can provide continuous-valued estimations of rain densities, which is more desirable in real applications.

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arXiv2020

Gliding vertex on the horizontal bounding box for multi-oriented object detection

Object detection has recently experienced substantial progress. Yet, the widely adopted horizontal bounding box representation is not appropriate for ubiquitous oriented objects such as objects in aerial images and scene texts. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework to detect multi-oriented objects. Instead of directly regressing the four vertices, we glide the vertex of the horizontal bounding box on each corresponding side to accurately describe a multi-oriented object. Specifically, We regress four length ratios characterizing the relative gliding offset on each corresponding side. This may facilitate the offset learning and avoid the confusion issue of sequential label points for oriented objects. To further remedy the confusion issue for nearly horizontal objects, we also introduce an obliquity factor based on area ratio between the object and its horizontal bounding box, guiding the selection of horizontal or oriented detection for each object. We add these five extra target variables to the regression head of faster R-CNN, which requires ignorable extra computation time. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that without bells and whistles, the proposed method achieves superior performances on multiple multi-oriented object detection benchmarks including object detection in aerial images, scene text detection, pedestrian detection in fisheye images.

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arXiv2020

FGN: Fully Guided Network for Few-Shot Instance Segmentation

Few-shot instance segmentation (FSIS) conjoins the few-shot learning paradigm with general instance segmentation, which provides a possible way of tackling instance segmentation in the lack of abundant labeled data for training. This paper presents a Fully Guided Network (FGN) for few-shot instance segmentation. FGN perceives FSIS as a guided model where a so-called support set is encoded and utilized to guide the predictions of a base instance segmentation network (i.e., Mask R-CNN), critical to which is the guidance mechanism. In this view, FGN introduces different guidance mechanisms into the various key components in Mask R-CNN, including Attention-Guided RPN, Relation-Guided Detector, and Attention-Guided FCN, in order to make full use of the guidance effect from the support set and adapt better to the inter-class generalization. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our proposed FGN can outperform the state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2020

Zero-Assignment Constraint for Graph Matching with Outliers

Graph matching (GM), as a longstanding problem in computer vision and pattern recognition, still suffers from numerous cluttered outliers in practical applications. To address this issue, we present the zero-assignment constraint (ZAC) for approaching the graph matching problem in the presence of outliers. The underlying idea is to suppress the matchings of outliers by assigning zero-valued vectors to the potential outliers in the obtained optimal correspondence matrix. We provide elaborate theoretical analysis to the problem, i.e., GM with ZAC, and figure out that the GM problem with and without outliers are intrinsically different, which enables us to put forward a sufficient condition to construct valid and reasonable objective function. Consequently, we design an efficient outlier-robust algorithm to significantly reduce the incorrect or redundant matchings caused by numerous outliers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve the state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency, especially in the presence of numerous outliers.

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arXiv2020

Fisheye Distortion Rectification from Deep Straight Lines

This paper presents a novel line-aware rectification network (LaRecNet) to address the problem of fisheye distortion rectification based on the classical observation that straight lines in 3D space should be still straight in image planes. Specifically, the proposed LaRecNet contains three sequential modules to (1) learn the distorted straight lines from fisheye images; (2) estimate the distortion parameters from the learned heatmaps and the image appearance; and (3) rectify the input images via a proposed differentiable rectification layer. To better train and evaluate the proposed model, we create a synthetic line-rich fisheye (SLF) dataset that contains the distortion parameters and well-annotated distorted straight lines of fisheye images. The proposed method enables us to simultaneously calibrate the geometric distortion parameters and rectify fisheye images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both geometric accuracy and image quality on several evaluation metrics. In particular, the images rectified by LaRecNet achieve an average reprojection error of 0.33 pixels on the SLF dataset and produce the highest peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structure similarity index (SSIM) compared with the groundtruth.

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