87 research outputs found
Pixel-wise segmentation of SAR imagery using encoder-decoder network and fully-connected CRF
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image segmentation is an important step in SAR image interpretation. Common Patch-based methods treat all the pixels within the patch as a single category and do not take the label consistency between neighbor patches into consideration, which makes the segmentation results less accurate. In this paper, we use an encoder-decoder network to conduct pixel-wise segmentation. Then, in order to make full use of the contextual information between patches, we use fully-connected conditional random field to optimize the combined probability map output from encoder-decoder network. The testing results on our SAR data set shows that our method can effectively maintain contextual information of pixels and achieve better segmentation results
A review of technical factors to consider when designing neural networks for semantic segmentation of Earth Observation imagery
Semantic segmentation (classification) of Earth Observation imagery is a
crucial task in remote sensing. This paper presents a comprehensive review of
technical factors to consider when designing neural networks for this purpose.
The review focuses on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural
Networks (RNNs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and transformer
models, discussing prominent design patterns for these ANN families and their
implications for semantic segmentation. Common pre-processing techniques for
ensuring optimal data preparation are also covered. These include methods for
image normalization and chipping, as well as strategies for addressing data
imbalance in training samples, and techniques for overcoming limited data,
including augmentation techniques, transfer learning, and domain adaptation. By
encompassing both the technical aspects of neural network design and the
data-related considerations, this review provides researchers and practitioners
with a comprehensive and up-to-date understanding of the factors involved in
designing effective neural networks for semantic segmentation of Earth
Observation imagery.Comment: 145 pages with 32 figure
Weakly Supervised Segmentation of SAR Imagery Using Superpixel and Hierarchically Adversarial CRF
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image segmentation aims at generating homogeneous regions from a pixel-based image and is the basis of image interpretation. However, most of the existing segmentation methods usually neglect the appearance and spatial consistency during feature extraction and also require a large number of training data. In addition, pixel-based processing cannot meet the real time requirement. We hereby present a weakly supervised algorithm to perform the task of segmentation for high-resolution SAR images. For effective segmentation, the input image is first over-segmented into a set of primitive superpixels. This algorithm combines hierarchical conditional generative adversarial nets (CGAN) and conditional random fields (CRF). The CGAN-based networks can leverage abundant unlabeled data learning parameters, reducing their reliance on the labeled samples. In order to preserve neighborhood consistency in the feature extraction stage, the hierarchical CGAN is composed of two sub-networks, which are employed to extract the information of the central superpixels and the corresponding background superpixels, respectively. Afterwards, CRF is utilized to perform label optimization using the concatenated features. Quantified experiments on an airborne SAR image dataset prove that the proposed method can effectively learn feature representations and achieve competitive accuracy to the state-of-the-art segmentation approaches. More specifically, our algorithm has a higher Cohen’s kappa coefficient and overall accuracy. Its computation time is less than the current mainstream pixel-level semantic segmentation networks
A Novel Attention Fully Convolutional Network Method for Synthetic Aperture Radar Image Segmentation
As an important step of synthetic aperture radar image interpretation, synthetic aperture radar image segmentation aims at segmenting an image into different regions in terms of homogeneity. Because of the deficiency of the labeled samples and the existence of speckling noise, synthetic aperture radar image segmentation is a challenging task. We present a new method for synthetic aperture radar image segmentation in this article. Due to the large size of the original synthetic aperture radar image, we first divide the input image into small slices. Then the image slices are input to the attention-based fully convolutional network for obtaining the segmentation results. Finally, the fully connected conditional random field is adopted for improving the segmentation performance of the network. The innovations of our method are as follows: 1) The attention-based fully convolutional network is embedded with the multiscale attention network which is capable of enhancing the extraction of the image features through three strategies, namely, multiscale feature extraction, channel attention extraction, and spatial attention extraction. 2) We design a new loss function for the attention fully convolutional network by combining Lovasz-Softmax and cross-entropy losses. The new loss allows us to simultaneously optimize the intersection over union and the pixel classification accuracy of the segmentation results. The experiments are performed on two airborne synthetic aperture radar image databases. It has been proved that our method is superior to other state-of- the-art image segmentation approaches
Road Segmentation in SAR Satellite Images with Deep Fully-Convolutional Neural Networks
Remote sensing is extensively used in cartography. As transportation networks
grow and change, extracting roads automatically from satellite images is
crucial to keep maps up-to-date. Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites can
provide high resolution topographical maps. However roads are difficult to
identify in these data as they look visually similar to targets such as rivers
and railways. Most road extraction methods on Synthetic Aperture Radar images
still rely on a prior segmentation performed by classical computer vision
algorithms. Few works study the potential of deep learning techniques, despite
their successful applications to optical imagery. This letter presents an
evaluation of Fully-Convolutional Neural Networks for road segmentation in SAR
images. We study the relative performance of early and state-of-the-art
networks after carefully enhancing their sensitivity towards thin objects by
adding spatial tolerance rules. Our models shows promising results,
successfully extracting most of the roads in our test dataset. This shows that,
although Fully-Convolutional Neural Networks natively lack efficiency for road
segmentation, they are capable of good results if properly tuned. As the
segmentation quality does not scale well with the increasing depth of the
networks, the design of specialized architectures for roads extraction should
yield better performances.Comment: 5 pages, accepted for publication in IEEE Geoscience and Remote
Sensing Letter
HED-UNet: Combined Segmentation and Edge Detection for Monitoring the Antarctic Coastline
Deep learning-based coastline detection algorithms have begun to outshine
traditional statistical methods in recent years. However, they are usually
trained only as single-purpose models to either segment land and water or
delineate the coastline. In contrast to this, a human annotator will usually
keep a mental map of both segmentation and delineation when performing manual
coastline detection. To take into account this task duality, we therefore
devise a new model to unite these two approaches in a deep learning model. By
taking inspiration from the main building blocks of a semantic segmentation
framework (UNet) and an edge detection framework (HED), both tasks are combined
in a natural way. Training is made efficient by employing deep supervision on
side predictions at multiple resolutions. Finally, a hierarchical attention
mechanism is introduced to adaptively merge these multiscale predictions into
the final model output. The advantages of this approach over other traditional
and deep learning-based methods for coastline detection are demonstrated on a
dataset of Sentinel-1 imagery covering parts of the Antarctic coast, where
coastline detection is notoriously difficult. An implementation of our method
is available at \url{https://github.com/khdlr/HED-UNet}.Comment: This work has been accepted by IEEE TGRS for publication. Copyright
may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be
accessibl
Artificial Neural Networks and Evolutionary Computation in Remote Sensing
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) and evolutionary computation methods have been successfully applied in remote sensing applications since they offer unique advantages for the analysis of remotely-sensed images. ANNs are effective in finding underlying relationships and structures within multidimensional datasets. Thanks to new sensors, we have images with more spectral bands at higher spatial resolutions, which clearly recall big data problems. For this purpose, evolutionary algorithms become the best solution for analysis. This book includes eleven high-quality papers, selected after a careful reviewing process, addressing current remote sensing problems. In the chapters of the book, superstructural optimization was suggested for the optimal design of feedforward neural networks, CNN networks were deployed for a nanosatellite payload to select images eligible for transmission to ground, a new weight feature value convolutional neural network (WFCNN) was applied for fine remote sensing image segmentation and extracting improved land-use information, mask regional-convolutional neural networks (Mask R-CNN) was employed for extracting valley fill faces, state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN)-based object detection models were applied to automatically detect airplanes and ships in VHR satellite images, a coarse-to-fine detection strategy was employed to detect ships at different sizes, and a deep quadruplet network (DQN) was proposed for hyperspectral image classification
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