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Jakub Nalepa

Publications and source records attributed to Jakub Nalepa.

36 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Multitemporal and multispectral data fusion for super-resolution of Sentinel-2 images

Multispectral Sentinel-2 images are a valuable source of Earth observation data, however spatial resolution of their spectral bands limited to 10 m, 20 m, and 60 m ground sampling distance remains insufficient in many cases. This problem can be addressed with super-resolution, aimed at reconstructing a high-resolution image from a low-resolution observation. For Sentinel-2, spectral information fusion allows for enhancing the 20 m and 60 m bands to the 10 m resolution. Also, there were attempts to combine multitemporal stacks of individual Sentinel-2 bands, however these two approaches have not been combined so far. In this paper, we introduce DeepSent -- a new deep network for super-resolving multitemporal series of multispectral Sentinel-2 images. It is underpinned with information fusion performed simultaneously in the spectral and temporal dimensions to generate an enlarged multispectral image. In our extensive experimental study, we demonstrate that our solution outperforms other state-of-the-art techniques that realize either multitemporal or multispectral data fusion. Furthermore, we show that the advantage of DeepSent results from how these two fusion types are combined in a single architecture, which is superior to performing such fusion in a sequential manner. Importantly, we have applied our method to super-resolve real-world Sentinel-2 images, enhancing the spatial resolution of all the spectral bands to 3.3 m nominal ground sampling distance, and we compare the outcome with very high-resolution WorldView-2 images. We will publish our implementation upon paper acceptance, and we expect it will increase the possibilities of exploiting super-resolved Sentinel-2 images in real-life applications.

cs.CV↗

MuS2: A Real-World Benchmark for Sentinel-2 Multi-Image Super-Resolution

Insufficient image spatial resolution is a serious limitation in many practical scenarios, especially when acquiring images at a finer scale is infeasible or brings higher costs. This is inherent to remote sensing, including Sentinel-2 satellite images that are available free of charge at a high revisit frequency, but whose spatial resolution is limited to 10 m ground sampling distance. The resolution can be increased with super-resolution algorithms, in particular when performed from multiple images captured at subsequent revisits of a satellite, taking advantage of information fusion that leads to enhanced reconstruction accuracy. One of the obstacles in multi-image super-resolution consists in the scarcity of real-world benchmarks - commonly, simulated data are exploited which do not fully reflect the operating conditions. In this paper, we introduce a new MuS2 benchmark for super-resolving multiple Sentinel-2 images, with WorldView-2 imagery used as the high-resolution reference. Within MuS2, we publish the first end-to-end evaluation procedure for this problem which we expect to help the researchers in advancing the state of the art in multi-image super-resolution.

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Self-Configuring nnU-Nets Detect Clouds in Satellite Images

Cloud detection is a pivotal satellite image pre-processing step that can be performed both on the ground and on board a satellite to tag useful images. In the latter case, it can help to reduce the amount of data to downlink by pruning the cloudy areas, or to make a satellite more autonomous through data-driven acquisition re-scheduling of the cloudy areas. We approach this important task with nnU-Nets, a self-reconfigurable framework able to perform meta-learning of a segmentation network over various datasets. Our experiments, performed over Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 multispectral images revealed that nnU-Nets deliver state-of-the-art cloud segmentation performance without any manual design. Our approach was ranked within the top 7% best solutions (across 847 participating teams) in the On Cloud N: Cloud Cover Detection Challenge, where we reached the Jaccard index of 0.882 over more than 10k unseen Sentinel-2 image patches (the winners obtained 0.897, whereas the baseline U-Net with the ResNet-34 backbone used as an encoder: 0.817, and the classic Sentinel-2 image thresholding: 0.652).

cs.CV↗

Deep learning automates bidimensional and volumetric tumor burden measurement from MRI in pre- and post-operative glioblastoma patients

Tumor burden assessment by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is central to the evaluation of treatment response for glioblastoma. This assessment is complex to perform and associated with high variability due to the high heterogeneity and complexity of the disease. In this work, we tackle this issue and propose a deep learning pipeline for the fully automated end-to-end analysis of glioblastoma patients. Our approach simultaneously identifies tumor sub-regions, including the enhancing tumor, peritumoral edema and surgical cavity in the first step, and then calculates the volumetric and bidimensional measurements that follow the current Response Assessment in Neuro-Oncology (RANO) criteria. Also, we introduce a rigorous manual annotation process which was followed to delineate the tumor sub-regions by the human experts, and to capture their segmentation confidences that are later used while training the deep learning models. The results of our extensive experimental study performed over 760 pre-operative and 504 post-operative adult patients with glioma obtained from the public database (acquired at 19 sites in years 2021-2020) and from a clinical treatment trial (47 and 69 sites for pre-/post-operative patients, 2009-2011) and backed up with thorough quantitative, qualitative and statistical analysis revealed that our pipeline performs accurate segmentation of pre- and post-operative MRIs in a fraction of the manual delineation time (up to 20 times faster than humans). The bidimensional and volumetric measurements were in strong agreement with expert radiologists, and we showed that RANO measurements are not always sufficient to quantify tumor burden.

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Graph Neural Networks Extract High-Resolution Cultivated Land Maps from Sentinel-2 Image Series

Maintaining farm sustainability through optimizing the agricultural management practices helps build more planet-friendly environment. The emerging satellite missions can acquire multi- and hyperspectral imagery which captures more detailed spectral information concerning the scanned area, hence allows us to benefit from subtle spectral features during the analysis process in agricultural applications. We introduce an approach for extracting 2.5 m cultivated land maps from 10 m Sentinel-2 multispectral image series which benefits from a compact graph convolutional neural network. The experiments indicate that our models not only outperform classical and deep machine learning techniques through delivering higher-quality segmentation maps, but also dramatically reduce the memory footprint when compared to U-Nets (almost 8k trainable parameters of our models, with up to 31M parameters of U-Nets). Such memory frugality is pivotal in the missions which allow us to uplink a model to the AI-powered satellite once it is in orbit, as sending large nets is impossible due to the time constraints.

cs.CV↗

A Multibranch Convolutional Neural Network for Hyperspectral Unmixing

Hyperspectral unmixing remains one of the most challenging tasks in the analysis of such data. Deep learning has been blooming in the field and proved to outperform other classic unmixing techniques, and can be effectively deployed onboard Earth observation satellites equipped with hyperspectral imagers. In this letter, we follow this research pathway and propose a multi-branch convolutional neural network that benefits from fusing spectral, spatial, and spectral-spatial features in the unmixing process. The results of our experiments, backed up with the ablation study, revealed that our techniques outperform others from the literature and lead to higher-quality fractional abundance estimation. Also, we investigated the influence of reducing the training sets on the capabilities of all algorithms and their robustness against noise, as capturing large and representative ground-truth sets is time-consuming and costly in practice, especially in emerging Earth observation scenarios.

cs.CV↗

Band Selection from Hyperspectral Images Using Attention-based Convolutional Neural Networks

This paper introduces new attention-based convolutional neural networks for selecting bands from hyperspectral images. The proposed approach re-uses convolutional activations at different depths, identifying the most informative regions of the spectrum with the help of gating mechanisms. Our attention techniques are modular and easy to implement, and they can be seamlessly trained end-to-end using gradient descent. Our rigorous experiments showed that deep models equipped with the attention mechanism deliver high-quality classification, and repeatedly identify significant bands in the training data, permitting the creation of refined and extremely compact sets that retain the most meaningful features.

cs.CV↗

Segmenting Hyperspectral Images Using Spectral-Spatial Convolutional Neural Networks With Training-Time Data Augmentation

Hyperspectral imaging provides detailed information about the scanned objects, as it captures their spectral characteristics within a large number of wavelength bands. Classification of such data has become an active research topic due to its wide applicability in a variety of fields. Deep learning has established the state of the art in the area, and it constitutes the current research mainstream. In this letter, we introduce a new spectral-spatial convolutional neural network, benefitting from a battery of data augmentation techniques which help deal with a real-life problem of lacking ground-truth training data. Our rigorous experiments showed that the proposed method outperforms other spectral-spatial techniques from the literature, and delivers precise hyperspectral classification in real time.

cs.CV↗

Unsupervised Segmentation of Hyperspectral Images Using 3D Convolutional Autoencoders

Hyperspectral image analysis has become an important topic widely researched by the remote sensing community. Classification and segmentation of such imagery help understand the underlying materials within a scanned scene, since hyperspectral images convey a detailed information captured in a number of spectral bands. Although deep learning has established the state of the art in the field, it still remains challenging to train well-generalizing models due to the lack of ground-truth data. In this letter, we tackle this problem and propose an end-to-end approach to segment hyperspectral images in a fully unsupervised way. We introduce a new deep architecture which couples 3D convolutional autoencoders with clustering. Our multi-faceted experimental study---performed over benchmark and real-life data---revealed that our approach delivers high-quality segmentation without any prior class labels.

cs.CV↗

Fully-automated deep learning-powered system for DCE-MRI analysis of brain tumors

Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) plays an important role in diagnosis and grading of brain tumor. Although manual DCE biomarker extraction algorithms boost the diagnostic yield of DCE-MRI by providing quantitative information on tumor prognosis and prediction, they are time-consuming and prone to human error. In this paper, we propose a fully-automated, end-to-end system for DCE-MRI analysis of brain tumors. Our deep learning-powered technique does not require any user interaction, it yields reproducible results, and it is rigorously validated against benchmark (BraTS'17 for tumor segmentation, and a test dataset released by the Quantitative Imaging Biomarkers Alliance for the contrast-concentration fitting) and clinical (44 low-grade glioma patients) data. Also, we introduce a cubic model of the vascular input function used for pharmacokinetic modeling which significantly decreases the fitting error when compared with the state of the art, alongside a real-time algorithm for determination of the vascular input region. An extensive experimental study, backed up with statistical tests, showed that our system delivers state-of-the-art results (in terms of segmentation accuracy and contrast-concentration fitting) while requiring less than 3 minutes to process an entire input DCE-MRI study using a single GPU.

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Transfer Learning for Segmenting Dimensionally-Reduced Hyperspectral Images

Deep learning has established the state of the art in multiple fields, including hyperspectral image analysis. However, training large-capacity learners to segment such imagery requires representative training sets. Acquiring such data is human-dependent and time-consuming, especially in Earth observation scenarios, where the hyperspectral data transfer is very costly and time-constrained. In this letter, we show how to effectively deal with a limited number and size of available hyperspectral ground-truth sets, and apply transfer learning for building deep feature extractors. Also, we exploit spectral dimensionality reduction to make our technique applicable over hyperspectral data acquired using different sensors, which may capture different numbers of hyperspectral bands. The experiments, performed over several benchmarks and backed up with statistical tests, indicated that our approach allows us to effectively train well-generalizing deep convolutional neural nets even using significantly reduced data.

cs.CV↗

On training deep networks for satellite image super-resolution

The capabilities of super-resolution reconstruction (SRR)---techniques for enhancing image spatial resolution---have been recently improved significantly by the use of deep convolutional neural networks. Commonly, such networks are learned using huge training sets composed of original images alongside their low-resolution counterparts, obtained with bicubic downsampling. In this paper, we investigate how the SRR performance is influenced by the way such low-resolution training data are obtained, which has not been explored up to date. Our extensive experimental study indicates that the training data characteristics have a large impact on the reconstruction accuracy, and the widely-adopted approach is not the most effective for dealing with satellite images. Overall, we argue that developing better training data preparation routines may be pivotal in making SRR suitable for real-world applications.

cs.CV↗

Hyperspectral Data Augmentation

Data augmentation is a popular technique which helps improve generalization capabilities of deep neural networks. It plays a pivotal role in remote-sensing scenarios in which the amount of high-quality ground truth data is limited, and acquiring new examples is costly or impossible. This is a common problem in hyperspectral imaging, where manual annotation of image data is difficult, expensive, and prone to human bias. In this letter, we propose online data augmentation of hyperspectral data which is executed during the inference rather than before the training of deep networks. This is in contrast to all other state-of-the-art hyperspectral augmentation algorithms which increase the size (and representativeness) of training sets. Additionally, we introduce a new principal component analysis based augmentation. The experiments revealed that our data augmentation algorithms improve generalization of deep networks, work in real-time, and the online approach can be effectively combined with offline techniques to enhance the classification accuracy.

cs.CV↗

Deep Learning for Multiple-Image Super-Resolution

Super-resolution reconstruction (SRR) is a process aimed at enhancing spatial resolution of images, either from a single observation, based on the learned relation between low and high resolution, or from multiple images presenting the same scene. SRR is particularly valuable, if it is infeasible to acquire images at desired resolution, but many images of the same scene are available at lower resolution---this is inherent to a variety of remote sensing scenarios. Recently, we have witnessed substantial improvement in single-image SRR attributed to the use of deep neural networks for learning the relation between low and high resolution. Importantly, deep learning has not been exploited for multiple-image SRR, which benefits from information fusion and in general allows for achieving higher reconstruction accuracy. In this letter, we introduce a new method which combines the advantages of multiple-image fusion with learning the low-to-high resolution mapping using deep networks. The reported experimental results indicate that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art SRR methods, including these that operate from a single image, as well as those that perform multiple-image fusion.

cs.CV↗

Validating Hyperspectral Image Segmentation

Hyperspectral satellite imaging attracts enormous research attention in the remote sensing community, hence automated approaches for precise segmentation of such imagery are being rapidly developed. In this letter, we share our observations on the strategy for validating hyperspectral image segmentation algorithms currently followed in the literature, and show that it can lead to over-optimistic experimental insights. We introduce a new routine for generating segmentation benchmarks, and use it to elaborate ready-to-use hyperspectral training-test data partitions. They can be utilized for fair validation of new and existing algorithms without any training-test data leakage.

cs.CV↗

A Parallel Memetic Algorithm to Solve the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

This paper presents a parallel memetic algorithm for solving the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). The VRPTW is a well-known NP-hard discrete optimization problem with two objectives. The main objective is to minimize the number of vehicles serving customers scattered on the map, and the second one is to minimize the total distance traveled by the vehicles. Here, the fleet size is minimized in the first phase of the proposed method using the parallel heuristic algorithm (PHA), and the traveled distance is minimized in the second phase by the parallel memetic algorithm (PMA). In both parallel algorithms, the parallel components co-operate periodically in order to exchange the best solutions found so far. An extensive experimental study performed on the Gehring and Homberger's benchmark proves the high convergence capabilities and robustness of both PHA and PMA. Also, we present the speedup analysis of the PMA.

cs.DC↗

Real-Time Hand Shape Classification

The problem of hand shape classification is challenging since a hand is characterized by a large number of degrees of freedom. Numerous shape descriptors have been proposed and applied over the years to estimate and classify hand poses in reasonable time. In this paper we discuss our parallel framework for real-time hand shape classification applicable in real-time applications. We show how the number of gallery images influences the classification accuracy and execution time of the parallel algorithm. We present the speedup and efficiency analyses that prove the efficacy of the parallel implementation. Noteworthy, different methods can be used at each step of our parallel framework. Here, we combine the shape contexts with the appearance-based techniques to enhance the robustness of the algorithm and to increase the classification score. An extensive experimental study proves the superiority of the proposed approach over existing state-of-the-art methods.

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