Land-Cover Classification with High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images Using Transferable Deep Models

In recent years, large amount of high spatial-resolution remote sensing (HRRS) images are available for land-cover mapping. However, due to the complex information brought by the increased spatial resolution and the data disturbances caused by different conditions of image acquisition, it is often difficult to find an efficient method for achieving accurate land-cover classification with high-resolution and heterogeneous remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a scheme to apply deep model obtained from labeled land-cover dataset to classify unlabeled HRRS images. The main idea is to rely on deep neural networks for presenting the contextual information contained in different types of land-covers and propose a pseudo-labeling and sample selection scheme for improving the transferability of deep models. More precisely, a deep Convolutional Neural Networks is first pre-trained with a well-annotated land-cover dataset, referred to as the source data. Then, given a target image with no labels, the pre-trained CNN model is utilized to classify the image in a patch-wise manner. The patches with high confidence are assigned with pseudo-labels and employed as the queries to retrieve related samples from the source data. The pseudo-labels confirmed with the retrieved results are regarded as supervised information for fine-tuning the pre-trained deep model. To obtain a pixel-wise land-cover classification with the target image, we rely on the fine-tuned CNN and develop a hybrid classification by combining patch-wise classification and hierarchical segmentation. In addition, we create a large-scale land-cover dataset containing 150 Gaofen-2 satellite images for CNN pre-training. Experiments on multi-source HRRS images show encouraging results and demonstrate the applicability of the proposed scheme to land-cover classification

Color-based Segmentation of Sky/Cloud Images From Ground-based Cameras

Sky/cloud images captured by ground-based cameras (a.k.a. whole sky imagers) are increasingly used nowadays because of their applications in a number of fields, including climate modeling, weather prediction, renewable energy generation, and satellite communications. Due to the wide variety of cloud types and lighting conditions in such images, accurate and robust segmentation of clouds is challenging. In this paper, we present a supervised segmentation framework for ground-based sky/cloud images based on a systematic analysis of different color spaces and components, using partial least squares (PLS) regression. Unlike other state-of-the-art methods, our proposed approach is entirely learning-based and does not require any manually-defined parameters. In addition, we release the Singapore Whole Sky IMaging SEGmentation Database (SWIMSEG), a large database of annotated sky/cloud images, to the research community

Exploiting Deep Features for Remote Sensing Image Retrieval: A Systematic Investigation

Remote sensing (RS) image retrieval is of great significant for geological information mining. Over the past two decades, a large amount of research on this task has been carried out, which mainly focuses on the following three core issues: feature extraction, similarity metric and relevance feedback. Due to the complexity and multiformity of ground objects in high-resolution remote sensing (HRRS) images, there is still room for improvement in the current retrieval approaches. In this paper, we analyze the three core issues of RS image retrieval and provide a comprehensive review on existing methods. Furthermore, for the goal to advance the state-of-the-art in HRRS image retrieval, we focus on the feature extraction issue and delve how to use powerful deep representations to address this task. We conduct systematic investigation on evaluating correlative factors that may affect the performance of deep features. By optimizing each factor, we acquire remarkable retrieval results on publicly available HRRS datasets. Finally, we explain the experimental phenomenon in detail and draw conclusions according to our analysis. Our work can serve as a guiding role for the research of content-based RS image retrieval

A Novel CNN-based Method for Accurate Ship Detection in HR Optical Remote Sensing Images via Rotated Bounding Box

Currently, reliable and accurate ship detection in optical remote sensing images is still challenging. Even the state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods cannot obtain very satisfactory results. To more accurately locate the ships in diverse orientations, some recent methods conduct the detection via the rotated bounding box. However, it further increases the difficulty of detection, because an additional variable of ship orientation must be accurately predicted in the algorithm. In this paper, a novel CNN-based ship detection method is proposed, by overcoming some common deficiencies of current CNN-based methods in ship detection. Specifically, to generate rotated region proposals, current methods have to predefine multi-oriented anchors, and predict all unknown variables together in one regression process, limiting the quality of overall prediction. By contrast, we are able to predict the orientation and other variables independently, and yet more effectively, with a novel dual-branch regression network, based on the observation that the ship targets are nearly rotation-invariant in remote sensing images. Next, a shape-adaptive pooling method is proposed, to overcome the limitation of typical regular ROI-pooling in extracting the features of the ships with various aspect ratios. Furthermore, we propose to incorporate multilevel features via the spatially-variant adaptive pooling. This novel approach, called multilevel adaptive pooling, leads to a compact feature representation more qualified for the simultaneous ship classification and localization. Finally, detailed ablation study performed on the proposed approaches is provided, along with some useful insights. Experimental results demonstrate the great superiority of the proposed method in ship detection

CloudSegNet: A Deep Network for Nychthemeron Cloud Image Segmentation

We analyze clouds in the earth's atmosphere using ground-based sky cameras. An accurate segmentation of clouds in the captured sky/cloud image is difficult, owing to the fuzzy boundaries of clouds. Several techniques have been proposed that use color as the discriminatory feature for cloud detection. In the existing literature, however, analysis of daytime and nighttime images is considered separately, mainly because of differences in image characteristics and applications. In this paper, we propose a light-weight deep-learning architecture called CloudSegNet. It is the first that integrates daytime and nighttime (also known as nychthemeron) image segmentation in a single framework, and achieves state-of-the-art results on public databases.Comment: Published in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, 201

A Survey on Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images

Object detection in optical remote sensing images, being a fundamental but challenging problem in the field of aerial and satellite image analysis, plays an important role for a wide range of applications and is receiving significant attention in recent years. While enormous methods exist, a deep review of the literature concerning generic object detection is still lacking. This paper aims to provide a review of the recent progress in this field. Different from several previously published surveys that focus on a specific object class such as building and road, we concentrate on more generic object categories including, but are not limited to, road, building, tree, vehicle, ship, airport, urban-area. Covering about 270 publications we survey 1) template matching-based object detection methods, 2) knowledge-based object detection methods, 3) object-based image analysis (OBIA)-based object detection methods, 4) machine learning-based object detection methods, and 5) five publicly available datasets and three standard evaluation metrics. We also discuss the challenges of current studies and propose two promising research directions, namely deep learning-based feature representation and weakly supervised learning-based geospatial object detection. It is our hope that this survey will be beneficial for the researchers to have better understanding of this research field.Comment: This manuscript is the accepted version for ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensin

Exploring Models and Data for Remote Sensing Image Caption Generation

Inspired by recent development of artificial satellite, remote sensing images have attracted extensive attention. Recently, noticeable progress has been made in scene classification and target detection.However, it is still not clear how to describe the remote sensing image content with accurate and concise sentences. In this paper, we investigate to describe the remote sensing images with accurate and flexible sentences. First, some annotated instructions are presented to better describe the remote sensing images considering the special characteristics of remote sensing images. Second, in order to exhaustively exploit the contents of remote sensing images, a large-scale aerial image data set is constructed for remote sensing image caption. Finally, a comprehensive review is presented on the proposed data set to fully advance the task of remote sensing caption. Extensive experiments on the proposed data set demonstrate that the content of the remote sensing image can be completely described by generating language descriptions. The data set is available at https://github.com/201528014227051/RSICD_optimalComment: 14 pages, 8 figure

Deep Learning for LiDAR Point Clouds in Autonomous Driving: A Review

Recently, the advancement of deep learning in discriminative feature learning from 3D LiDAR data has led to rapid development in the field of autonomous driving. However, automated processing uneven, unstructured, noisy, and massive 3D point clouds is a challenging and tedious task. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of existing compelling deep learning architectures applied in LiDAR point clouds, detailing for specific tasks in autonomous driving such as segmentation, detection, and classification. Although several published research papers focus on specific topics in computer vision for autonomous vehicles, to date, no general survey on deep learning applied in LiDAR point clouds for autonomous vehicles exists. Thus, the goal of this paper is to narrow the gap in this topic. More than 140 key contributions in the recent five years are summarized in this survey, including the milestone 3D deep architectures, the remarkable deep learning applications in 3D semantic segmentation, object detection, and classification; specific datasets, evaluation metrics, and the state of the art performance. Finally, we conclude the remaining challenges and future researches.Comment: 21 pages, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning System

Fine-Grained Land Use Classification at the City Scale Using Ground-Level Images

We perform fine-grained land use mapping at the city scale using ground-level images. Mapping land use is considerably more difficult than mapping land cover and is generally not possible using overhead imagery as it requires close-up views and seeing inside buildings. We postulate that the growing collections of georeferenced, ground-level images suggest an alternate approach to this geographic knowledge discovery problem. We develop a general framework that uses Flickr images to map 45 different land-use classes for the City of San Francisco. Individual images are classified using a novel convolutional neural network containing two streams, one for recognizing objects and another for recognizing scenes. This network is trained in an end-to-end manner directly on the labeled training images. We propose several strategies to overcome the noisiness of our user-generated data including search-based training set augmentation and online adaptive training. We derive a ground truth map of San Francisco in order to evaluate our method. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through geo-visualization and quantitative analysis. Our framework achieves over 29% recall at the individual land parcel level which represents a strong baseline for the challenging 45-way land use classification problem especially given the noisiness of the image data

What do We Learn by Semantic Scene Understanding for Remote Sensing imagery in CNN framework?

Recently, deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) achieved increasingly remarkable success and rapidly developed in the field of natural image recognition. Compared with the natural image, the scale of remote sensing image is larger and the scene and the object it represents are more macroscopic. This study inquires whether remote sensing scene and natural scene recognitions differ and raises the following questions: What are the key factors in remote sensing scene recognition? Is the DCNN recognition mechanism centered on object recognition still applicable to the scenarios of remote sensing scene understanding? We performed several experiments to explore the influence of the DCNN structure and the scale of remote sensing scene understanding from the perspective of scene complexity. Our experiment shows that understanding a complex scene depends on an in-depth network and multiple-scale perception. Using a visualization method, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyze the recognition mechanism in a complex remote sensing scene and demonstrate the importance of multi-objective joint semantic support