Binary Patterns Encoded Convolutional Neural Networks for Texture Recognition and Remote Sensing Scene Classification

Designing discriminative powerful texture features robust to realistic imaging conditions is a challenging computer vision problem with many applications, including material recognition and analysis of satellite or aerial imagery. In the past, most texture description approaches were based on dense orderless statistical distribution of local features. However, most recent approaches to texture recognition and remote sensing scene classification are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The d facto practice when learning these CNN models is to use RGB patches as input with training performed on large amounts of labeled data (ImageNet). In this paper, we show that Binary Patterns encoded CNN models, codenamed TEX-Nets, trained using mapped coded images with explicit texture information provide complementary information to the standard RGB deep models. Additionally, two deep architectures, namely early and late fusion, are investigated to combine the texture and color information. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate Binary Patterns encoded CNNs and different deep network fusion architectures for texture recognition and remote sensing scene classification. We perform comprehensive experiments on four texture recognition datasets and four remote sensing scene classification benchmarks: UC-Merced with 21 scene categories, WHU-RS19 with 19 scene classes, RSSCN7 with 7 categories and the recently introduced large scale aerial image dataset (AID) with 30 aerial scene types. We demonstrate that TEX-Nets provide complementary information to standard RGB deep model of the same network architecture. Our late fusion TEX-Net architecture always improves the overall performance compared to the standard RGB network on both recognition problems. Our final combination outperforms the state-of-the-art without employing fine-tuning or ensemble of RGB network architectures.Comment: To appear in ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensin

Image fusion techniqes for remote sensing applications

Image fusion refers to the acquisition, processing and synergistic combination of information provided by various sensors or by the same sensor in many measuring contexts. The aim of this survey paper is to describe three typical applications of data fusion in remote sensing. The first study case considers the problem of the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Interferometry, where a pair of antennas are used to obtain an elevation map of the observed scene; the second one refers to the fusion of multisensor and multitemporal (Landsat Thematic Mapper and SAR) images of the same site acquired at different times, by using neural networks; the third one presents a processor to fuse multifrequency, multipolarization and mutiresolution SAR images, based on wavelet transform and multiscale Kalman filter. Each study case presents also results achieved by the proposed techniques applied to real data

A Self-Organizing Neural System for Learning to Recognize Textured Scenes

A self-organizing ARTEX model is developed to categorize and classify textured image regions. ARTEX specializes the FACADE model of how the visual cortex sees, and the ART model of how temporal and prefrontal cortices interact with the hippocampal system to learn visual recognition categories and their names. FACADE processing generates a vector of boundary and surface properties, notably texture and brightness properties, by utilizing multi-scale filtering, competition, and diffusive filling-in. Its context-sensitive local measures of textured scenes can be used to recognize scenic properties that gradually change across space, as well a.s abrupt texture boundaries. ART incrementally learns recognition categories that classify FACADE output vectors, class names of these categories, and their probabilities. Top-down expectations within ART encode learned prototypes that pay attention to expected visual features. When novel visual information creates a poor match with the best existing category prototype, a memory search selects a new category with which classify the novel data. ARTEX is compared with psychophysical data, and is benchmarked on classification of natural textures and synthetic aperture radar images. It outperforms state-of-the-art systems that use rule-based, backpropagation, and K-nearest neighbor classifiers.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409, N00014-95-1-0657

Satellite Image Fusion in Various Domains

In order to find out the fusion algorithm which is best suited for the panchromatic and multispectral images, fusion algorithms, such as PCA and wavelet algorithms have been employed and analyzed. In this paper, performance evaluation criteria are also used for quantitative assessment of the fusion performance. The spectral quality of fused images is evaluated by the ERGAS and Q4. The analysis indicates that the DWT fusion scheme has the best definition as well as spectral fidelity, and has better performance with regard to the high textural information absorption. Therefore, as the study area is concerned, it is most suited for the panchromatic and multispectral image fusion. an image fusion algorithm based on wavelet transform is proposed for Multispectral and panchromatic satellite image by using fusion in spatial and transform domains. In the proposed scheme, the images to be processed are decomposed into sub-images with the same resolution at same levels and different resolution at different levels and then the information fusion is performed using high-frequency sub-images under the Multi-resolution image fusion scheme based on wavelets produces better fused image than that by the MS or WA schemes

Super-Resolution for Overhead Imagery Using DenseNets and Adversarial Learning

Recent advances in Generative Adversarial Learning allow for new modalities of image super-resolution by learning low to high resolution mappings. In this paper we present our work using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with applications to overhead and satellite imagery. We have experimented with several state-of-the-art architectures. We propose a GAN-based architecture using densely connected convolutional neural networks (DenseNets) to be able to super-resolve overhead imagery with a factor of up to 8x. We have also investigated resolution limits of these networks. We report results on several publicly available datasets, including SpaceNet data and IARPA Multi-View Stereo Challenge, and compare performance with other state-of-the-art architectures.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, WACV 2018 submissio

Scale-MAE: A Scale-Aware Masked Autoencoder for Multiscale Geospatial Representation Learning

Large, pretrained models are commonly finetuned with imagery that is heavily augmented to mimic different conditions and scales, with the resulting models used for various tasks with imagery from a range of spatial scales. Such models overlook scale-specific information in the data for scale-dependent domains, such as remote sensing. In this paper, we present Scale-MAE, a pretraining method that explicitly learns relationships between data at different, known scales throughout the pretraining process. Scale-MAE pretrains a network by masking an input image at a known input scale, where the area of the Earth covered by the image determines the scale of the ViT positional encoding, not the image resolution. Scale-MAE encodes the masked image with a standard ViT backbone, and then decodes the masked image through a bandpass filter to reconstruct low/high frequency images at lower/higher scales. We find that tasking the network with reconstructing both low/high frequency images leads to robust multiscale representations for remote sensing imagery. Scale-MAE achieves an average of a $2.4 - 5.6\%$ non-parametric kNN classification improvement across eight remote sensing datasets compared to current state-of-the-art and obtains a $0.9$ mIoU to $1.7$ mIoU improvement on the SpaceNet building segmentation transfer task for a range of evaluation scales