A generic self-supervised learning (SSL) framework for representation learning from spectra-spatial feature of unlabeled remote sensing imagery

Remote sensing data has been widely used for various Earth Observation (EO) missions such as land use and cover classification, weather forecasting, agricultural management, and environmental monitoring. Most existing remote sensing data-based models are based on supervised learning that requires large and representative human-labelled data for model training, which is costly and time-consuming. Recently, self-supervised learning (SSL) enables the models to learn a representation from orders of magnitude more unlabelled data. This representation has been proven to boost the performance of downstream tasks and has potential for remote sensing applications. The success of SSL is heavily dependent on a pre-designed pretext task, which introduces an inductive bias into the model from a large amount of unlabelled data. Since remote sensing imagery has rich spectral information beyond the standard RGB colour space, the pretext tasks established in computer vision based on RGB images may not be straightforward to be extended to the multi/hyperspectral domain. To address this challenge, this work has designed a novel SSL framework that is capable of learning representation from both spectra-spatial information of unlabelled data. The framework contains two novel pretext tasks for object-based and pixel-based remote sensing data analysis methods, respectively. Through two typical downstream tasks evaluation (a multi-label land cover classification task on Sentienl-2 multispectral datasets and a ground soil parameter retrieval task on hyperspectral datasets), the results demonstrate that the representation obtained through the proposed SSL achieved a significant improvement in model performance

MVP: Meta Visual Prompt Tuning for Few-Shot Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification

Vision Transformer (ViT) models have recently emerged as powerful and versatile models for various visual tasks. Recently, a work called PMF has achieved promising results in few-shot image classification by utilizing pre-trained vision transformer models. However, PMF employs full fine-tuning for learning the downstream tasks, leading to significant overfitting and storage issues, especially in the remote sensing domain. In order to tackle these issues, we turn to the recently proposed parameter-efficient tuning methods, such as VPT, which updates only the newly added prompt parameters while keeping the pre-trained backbone frozen. Inspired by VPT, we propose the Meta Visual Prompt Tuning (MVP) method. Specifically, we integrate the VPT method into the meta-learning framework and tailor it to the remote sensing domain, resulting in an efficient framework for Few-Shot Remote Sensing Scene Classification (FS-RSSC). Furthermore, we introduce a novel data augmentation strategy based on patch embedding recombination to enhance the representation and diversity of scenes for classification purposes. Experiment results on the FS-RSSC benchmark demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed MVP over existing methods in various settings, such as various-way-various-shot, various-way-one-shot, and cross-domain adaptation.Comment: SUBMIT TO IEEE TRANSACTION

Towards Out-of-Distribution Detection for Remote Sensing

In remote sensing, distributional mismatch between the training and test data may arise due to several reasons, including unseen classes in the test data, differences in the geographic area, and multi-sensor differences. Deep learning based models may behave in unexpected manners when subjected to test data that has such distributional shifts from the training data, also called out-of-distribution (OOD) examples. Vulnerability to OOD data severely reduces the reliability of deep learning based models. In this work, we address this issue by proposing a model to quantify distributional uncertainty of deep learning based remote sensing models. In particular, we adopt a Dirichlet Prior Network for remote sensing data. The approach seeks to maximize the representation gap between the in-domain and OOD examples for a better identification of unknown examples at test time. Experimental results on three exemplary test scenarios show that the proposed model can detect OOD images in remote sensing

Unsupervised domain adaptation semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing imagery with invariant domain-level prototype memory

Semantic segmentation is a key technique involved in automatic interpretation of high-resolution remote sensing (HRS) imagery and has drawn much attention in the remote sensing community. Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have been successfully applied to the HRS imagery semantic segmentation task due to their hierarchical representation ability. However, the heavy dependency on a large number of training data with dense annotation and the sensitiveness to the variation of data distribution severely restrict the potential application of DCNNs for the semantic segmentation of HRS imagery. This study proposes a novel unsupervised domain adaptation semantic segmentation network (MemoryAdaptNet) for the semantic segmentation of HRS imagery. MemoryAdaptNet constructs an output space adversarial learning scheme to bridge the domain distribution discrepancy between source domain and target domain and to narrow the influence of domain shift. Specifically, we embed an invariant feature memory module to store invariant domain-level context information because the features obtained from adversarial learning only tend to represent the variant feature of current limited inputs. This module is integrated by a category attention-driven invariant domain-level context aggregation module to current pseudo invariant feature for further augmenting the pixel representations. An entropy-based pseudo label filtering strategy is used to update the memory module with high-confident pseudo invariant feature of current target images. Extensive experiments under three cross-domain tasks indicate that our proposed MemoryAdaptNet is remarkably superior to the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures and 8 table

Hyperspectral image representation through alpha-trees

International audienceα-trees provide a hierarchical representation of an image into partitions of regions with increasing heterogeneity. This model, inspired from the single-linkage paradigm, has recently been revisited for grayscale images and has been successfully used in the field of remote sensing. This article shows how this representation can be adapted to more complex data here hyperspectral images, according to different strategies. We know that the measure of distance between two neighbouring pixels is a key element for the quality of the underlying tree, but usual metrics are not satisfying. We show here that a relevant solution to understand hyperspectral data relies on the prior learning of the metric to be used and the exploitation of domain knowledge

A generic Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) framework for representation learning from spectral–spatial features of unlabeled remote sensing imagery

Remote sensing data has been widely used for various Earth Observation (EO) missions such as land use and cover classification, weather forecasting, agricultural management, and environmental monitoring. Most existing remote-sensing-data-based models are based on supervised learning that requires large and representative human-labeled data for model training, which is costly and time-consuming. The recent introduction of self-supervised learning (SSL) enables models to learn a representation from orders of magnitude more unlabeled data. The success of SSL is heavily dependent on a pre-designed pretext task, which introduces an inductive bias into the model from a large amount of unlabeled data. Since remote sensing imagery has rich spectral information beyond the standard RGB color space, it may not be straightforward to extend to the multi/hyperspectral domain the pretext tasks established in computer vision based on RGB images. To address this challenge, this work proposed a generic self-supervised learning framework based on remote sensing data at both the object and pixel levels. The method contains two novel pretext tasks, one for object-based and one for pixel-based remote sensing data analysis methods. One pretext task is used to reconstruct the spectral profile from the masked data, which can be used to extract a representation of pixel information and improve the performance of downstream tasks associated with pixel-based analysis. The second pretext task is used to identify objects from multiple views of the same object in multispectral data, which can be used to extract a representation and improve the performance of downstream tasks associated with object-based analysis. The results of two typical downstream task evaluation exercises (a multilabel land cover classification task on Sentinel-2 multispectral datasets and a ground soil parameter retrieval task on hyperspectral datasets) demonstrate that the proposed SSL method learns a target representation that covers both spatial and spectral information from massive unlabeled data. A comparison with currently available SSL methods shows that the proposed method, which emphasizes both spectral and spatial features, outperforms existing SSL methods on multi- and hyperspectral remote sensing datasets. We believe that this approach has the potential to be effective in a wider range of remote sensing applications and we will explore its utility in more remote sensing applications in the future

State-of-the-art and gaps for deep learning on limited training data in remote sensing

Deep learning usually requires big data, with respect to both volume and variety. However, most remote sensing applications only have limited training data, of which a small subset is labeled. Herein, we review three state-of-the-art approaches in deep learning to combat this challenge. The first topic is transfer learning, in which some aspects of one domain, e.g., features, are transferred to another domain. The next is unsupervised learning, e.g., autoencoders, which operate on unlabeled data. The last is generative adversarial networks, which can generate realistic looking data that can fool the likes of both a deep learning network and human. The aim of this article is to raise awareness of this dilemma, to direct the reader to existing work and to highlight current gaps that need solving.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1709.0030