Deep learning-based change detection in remote sensing images:a review

Images gathered from different satellites are vastly available these days due to the fast development of remote sensing (RS) technology. These images significantly enhance the data sources of change detection (CD). CD is a technique of recognizing the dissimilarities in the images acquired at distinct intervals and are used for numerous applications, such as urban area development, disaster management, land cover object identification, etc. In recent years, deep learning (DL) techniques have been used tremendously in change detection processes, where it has achieved great success because of their practical applications. Some researchers have even claimed that DL approaches outperform traditional approaches and enhance change detection accuracy. Therefore, this review focuses on deep learning techniques, such as supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised for different change detection datasets, such as SAR, multispectral, hyperspectral, VHR, and heterogeneous images, and their advantages and disadvantages will be highlighted. In the end, some significant challenges are discussed to understand the context of improvements in change detection datasets and deep learning models. Overall, this review will be beneficial for the future development of CD methods

Graph Laplacian for Image Anomaly Detection

Reed-Xiaoli detector (RXD) is recognized as the benchmark algorithm for image anomaly detection; however, it presents known limitations, namely the dependence over the image following a multivariate Gaussian model, the estimation and inversion of a high-dimensional covariance matrix, and the inability to effectively include spatial awareness in its evaluation. In this work, a novel graph-based solution to the image anomaly detection problem is proposed; leveraging the graph Fourier transform, we are able to overcome some of RXD's limitations while reducing computational cost at the same time. Tests over both hyperspectral and medical images, using both synthetic and real anomalies, prove the proposed technique is able to obtain significant gains over performance by other algorithms in the state of the art.Comment: Published in Machine Vision and Applications (Springer

From Easy to Hard: Learning Language-Guided Curriculum for Visual Question Answering on Remote Sensing Data

Visual question answering (VQA) for remote sensing scene has great potential in intelligent human–computer interaction system. Although VQA in computer vision has been widely researched, VQA for remote sensing data (RSVQA) is still in its infancy. There are two characteristics that need to be specially considered for the RSVQA task: 1) no object annotations are available in the RSVQA datasets, which makes it difficult for models to exploit informative region representation and 2) there are questions with clearly different difficulty levels for each image in the RSVQA task. Directly training a model with questions in a random order may confuse the model and limit the performance. To address these two problems, in this article, a multi-level visual feature learning method is proposed to jointly extract language-guided holistic and regional image features. Besides, a self-paced curriculum learning (SPCL)-based VQA model is developed to train networks with samples in an easy-to-hard way. To be more specific, a language-guided SPCL method with a soft weighting strategy is explored in this work. The proposed model is evaluated on three public datasets, and extensive experimental results show that the proposed RSVQA framework can achieve promising performance. Code will be available at https://gitlab.lrz.de/ai4eo/reasoning/VQA-easy2har

Remote Sensing Object Detection Meets Deep Learning: A Meta-review of Challenges and Advances

Remote sensing object detection (RSOD), one of the most fundamental and challenging tasks in the remote sensing field, has received longstanding attention. In recent years, deep learning techniques have demonstrated robust feature representation capabilities and led to a big leap in the development of RSOD techniques. In this era of rapid technical evolution, this review aims to present a comprehensive review of the recent achievements in deep learning based RSOD methods. More than 300 papers are covered in this review. We identify five main challenges in RSOD, including multi-scale object detection, rotated object detection, weak object detection, tiny object detection, and object detection with limited supervision, and systematically review the corresponding methods developed in a hierarchical division manner. We also review the widely used benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics within the field of RSOD, as well as the application scenarios for RSOD. Future research directions are provided for further promoting the research in RSOD.Comment: Accepted with IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine. More than 300 papers relevant to the RSOD filed were reviewed in this surve

Joint bilateral filtering and spectral similarity-based sparse representation: A generic framework for effective feature extraction and data classification in hyperspectral imaging

Classification of hyperspectral images (HSI) has been a challenging problem under active investigation for years especially due to the extremely high data dimensionality and limited number of samples available for training. It is found that hyperspectral image classification can be generally improved only if the feature extraction technique and the classifier are both addressed. In this paper, a novel classification framework for hyperspectral images based on the joint bilateral filter and sparse representation classification (SRC) is proposed. By employing the first principal component as the guidance image for the joint bilateral filter, spatial features can be extracted with minimum edge blurring thus improving the quality of the band-to-band images. For this reason, the performance of the joint bilateral filter has shown better than that of the conventional bilateral filter in this work. In addition, the spectral similarity-based joint SRC (SS-JSRC) is proposed to overcome the weakness of the traditional JSRC method. By combining the joint bilateral filtering and SS-JSRC together, the superiority of the proposed classification framework is demonstrated with respect to several state-of-the-art spectral-spatial classification approaches commonly employed in the HSI community, with better classification accuracy and Kappa coefficient achieved