Robust unsupervised small area change detection from SAR imagery using deep learning

Small area change detection using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is a highly challenging task, due to speckle noise and imbalance between classes (changed and unchanged). In this paper, a robust unsupervised approach is proposed for small area change detection using deep learning techniques. First, a multi-scale superpixel reconstruction method is developed to generate a difference image (DI), which can suppress the speckle noise effectively and enhance edges by exploiting local, spatially homogeneous information. Second, a two-stage centre-constrained fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm is proposed to divide the pixels of the DI into changed, unchanged and intermediate classes with a parallel clustering strategy. Image patches belonging to the first two classes are then constructed as pseudo-label training samples, and image patches of the intermediate class are treated as testing samples. Finally, a convolutional wavelet neural network (CWNN) is designed and trained to classify testing samples into changed or unchanged classes, coupled with a deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DCGAN) to increase the number of changed class within the pseudo-label training samples. Numerical experiments on four real SAR datasets demonstrate the validity and robustness of the proposed approach, achieving up to 99.61% accuracy for small area change detection

Two-Phase Object-Based Deep Learning for Multi-Temporal SAR Image Change Detection

Change detection is one of the fundamental applications of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. However, speckle noise presented in SAR images has a negative effect on change detection, leading to frequent false alarms in the mapping products. In this research, a novel two-phase object-based deep learning approach is proposed for multi-temporal SAR image change detection. Compared with traditional methods, the proposed approach brings two main innovations. One is to classify all pixels into three categories rather than two categories: unchanged pixels, changed pixels caused by strong speckle (false changes), and changed pixels formed by real terrain variation (real changes). The other is to group neighbouring pixels into superpixel objects such as to exploit local spatial context. Two phases are designed in the methodology: (1) Generate objects based on the simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) algorithm, and discriminate these objects into changed and unchanged classes using fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering and a deep PCANet. The prediction of this Phase is the set of changed and unchanged superpixels. (2) Deep learning on the pixel sets over the changed superpixels only, obtained in the first phase, to discriminate real changes from false changes. SLIC is employed again to achieve new superpixels in the second phase. Low rank and sparse decomposition are applied to these new superpixels to suppress speckle noise significantly. A further clustering step is applied to these new superpixels via FCM. A new PCANet is then trained to classify two kinds of changed superpixels to achieve the final change maps. Numerical experiments demonstrate that, compared with benchmark methods, the proposed approach can distinguish real changes from false changes effectively with significantly reduced false alarm rates, and achieve up to 99.71% change detection accuracy using multi-temporal SAR imagery

Block-Diagonal Constrained Low-Rank and Sparse Graph for Discriminant Analysis of Image Data

Recently, low-rank and sparse model-based dimensionality reduction (DR) methods have aroused lots of interest. In this paper, we propose an effective supervised DR technique named block-diagonal constrained low-rank and sparse-based embedding (BLSE). BLSE has two steps, i.e., block-diagonal constrained low-rank and sparse representation (BLSR) and block-diagonal constrained low-rank and sparse graph embedding (BLSGE). Firstly, the BLSR model is developed to reveal the intrinsic intra-class and inter-class adjacent relationships as well as the local neighborhood relations and global structure of data. Particularly, there are mainly three items considered in BLSR. First, a sparse constraint is required to discover the local data structure. Second, a low-rank criterion is incorporated to capture the global structure in data. Third, a block-diagonal regularization is imposed on the representation to promote discrimination between different classes. Based on BLSR, informative and discriminative intra-class and inter-class graphs are constructed. With the graphs, BLSGE seeks a low-dimensional embedding subspace by simultaneously minimizing the intra-class scatter and maximizing the inter-class scatter. Experiments on public benchmark face and object image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach

AMFuse: Add–Multiply-Based Cross-Modal Fusion Network for Multi-Spectral Semantic Segmentation

Multi-spectral semantic segmentation has shown great advantages under poor illumination conditions, especially for remote scene understanding of autonomous vehicles, since the thermal image can provide complementary information for RGB image. However, methods to fuse the information from RGB image and thermal image are still under-explored. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective module, add–multiply fusion (AMFuse) for RGB and thermal information fusion, consisting of two simple math operations—addition and multiplication. The addition operation focuses on extracting cross-modal complementary features, while the multiplication operation concentrates on the cross-modal common features. Moreover, the attention module and atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) modules are also incorporated into our proposed AMFuse modules, to enhance the multi-scale context information. Finally, in the UNet-style encoder–decoder framework, the ResNet model is adopted as the encoder. As for the decoder part, the multi-scale information obtained from our proposed AMFuse modules is hierarchically merged layer-by-layer to restore the feature map resolution for semantic segmentation. The experiments of RGBT multi-spectral semantic segmentation and salient object detection demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed AMFuse module for fusing the RGB and thermal information

AMFuse: Add–Multiply-Based Cross-Modal Fusion Network for Multi-Spectral Semantic Segmentation

Multi-spectral semantic segmentation has shown great advantages under poor illumination conditions, especially for remote scene understanding of autonomous vehicles, since the thermal image can provide complementary information for RGB image. However, methods to fuse the information from RGB image and thermal image are still under-explored. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective module, add–multiply fusion (AMFuse) for RGB and thermal information fusion, consisting of two simple math operations—addition and multiplication. The addition operation focuses on extracting cross-modal complementary features, while the multiplication operation concentrates on the cross-modal common features. Moreover, the attention module and atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) modules are also incorporated into our proposed AMFuse modules, to enhance the multi-scale context information. Finally, in the UNet-style encoder–decoder framework, the ResNet model is adopted as the encoder. As for the decoder part, the multi-scale information obtained from our proposed AMFuse modules is hierarchically merged layer-by-layer to restore the feature map resolution for semantic segmentation. The experiments of RGBT multi-spectral semantic segmentation and salient object detection demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed AMFuse module for fusing the RGB and thermal information

Compensated Attention Feature Fusion and Hierarchical Multiplication Decoder Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection

Multi-modal feature fusion and effectively exploiting high-level semantic information are critical in salient object detection (SOD). However, the depth maps complementing RGB image fusion strategies cannot supply effective semantic information when the object is not salient in the depth maps. Furthermore, most existing (UNet-based) methods cannot fully exploit high-level abstract features to guide low-level features in a coarse-to-fine fashion. In this paper, we propose a compensated attention feature fusion and hierarchical multiplication decoder network (CAF-HMNet) for RGB-D SOD. Specifically, we first propose a compensated attention feature fusion module to fuse multi-modal features based on the complementarity between depth and RGB features. Then, we propose a hierarchical multiplication decoder to refine the multi-level features from top down. Additionally, a contour-aware module is applied to enhance object contour. Experimental results show that our model achieves satisfactory performance on five challenging SOD datasets, including NJU2K, NLPR, STERE, DES, and SIP, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed CAF-HMNet

Spectrum Assignment with Non-Deterministic Bandwidth of Spectrum Holein Cognitive Radio Networks

The spectrum allocation for cognitive radio networks (CRNs) has received considerable studies under the assumption that the bandwidth of spectrum holes is static. However, in practice, the bandwidth of spectrum holes is time-varied due to primary user/secondary user (PU/SU) activity and mobility, which result in non-determinacy. This paper studies the spectrum allocation for CRNs with non-deterministic bandwidth of spectrum holes. We present a novel probability density function (PDF) model through order statistic to describe the non-deterministic bandwidth of spectrum holes and provide a bound to approximate it. After that, a statistical spectrum allocation model based on stochastic multiple knapsack problem (MKP) is established for spectrum allocation with non-deterministic bandwidth of spectrum holes. To reduce the computational complexity, we transform this stochastic programming probleminto a constant MKP though exploiting the properties of cumulative distribution function (CDF), which can be solved via MTHG algorithm by using auxiliary variable. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed statistical spectrum allocation algorithm can achieve better performances compared to the existing algorithms when the bandwidth of spectrum holes istime-varied