Search

As a fundamental but challenging task in the interpretation of remote sensing images, scene classification plays an important role in various applications and has become an active research topic. Many previous works have demonstrated the remarkable performance of the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for remote sensing scene classification. However, the progress made by CNN-based methods for scene classification has gradually reached saturation in recent years, due to the serious dependence on the pretrained CNN models, the limitations of manually designed network architecture and the disadvantages of existing data sets. In this article, a new paradigm to automatically design a suitable CNN architecture for scene classification is investigated. We propose an efficient architecture search framework to discover optimal network architectures in continuous search space with the gradient-based optimization method. Our framework consists of two stages: the search phase and the evaluation phase. During the search process, a greedy and progressive search strategy is introduced to search network building blocks (i.e., cells) through bilevel optimization. Besides, we propose a simple architecture regularization scheme to further improve the search efficiency and the robustness of discovered architectures. After the search process, the optimal cell architectures are determined and then repeatedly stacked to construct the final network for evaluation. For the data set, we propose a mergence strategy to build a new large-scale remote sensing scene image data set that contains rich scene categories and image diversity, making it feasible to find a new CNN model with strong generalization ability for scene classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed search strategies and the impressive classification performance of searched CNN architectures on seven public benchmark data sets, including four large-scale data sets and three small-scale data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small target detection is a challenging task in very-high-resolution (VHR) optical remote sensing imagery, because small targets occupy a minuscule number of pixels and are easily disturbed by backgrounds or occluded by others. Although current convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approaches perform well when detecting normal objects, they are barely suitable for detecting small ones. Two practical problems stand in their way. First, current CNN-based approaches are not specifically designed for the minuscule size of small targets (~15 or ~10 pixels in extent). Second, no well-established data sets include labeled small targets and establishing one from scratch is labor-intensive and time-consuming. To address these two issues, we propose an approach that combines Sig-NMS-based Faster R-CNN with transfer learning. Sig-NMS replaces traditional non-maximum suppression (NMS) in the stage of region proposal network and decreases the possibility of missing small targets. Transfer learning can effectively label remote sensing images by automatically annotating both object classes and object locations. We conduct an experiment on three data sets of VHR optical remote sensing images, RSOD, LEVIR, and NWPU VHR-10, to validate our approach. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively detect small targets in the VHR optical remote sensing images of about $10\times 10$ pixels and automatically label small targets as well. In addition, our method presents better mean average precisions than other state-of-the-art methods: 1.5% higher when performing on the RSOD data set, 17.8% higher on the LEVIR data set, and 3.8% higher on NWPU VHR-10. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supervised deep neural networks (DNNs) have been extensively used in diverse tasks. Generally, training such DNNs with superior performance requires a large amount of labeled data. However, it is time-consuming and expensive to manually label the data, especially for tasks in remote sensing, e.g., change detection. The situation motivates us to resort to the existing related images with labels, from which the concept of change can be adapted to new images. However, the distributions of the related labeled images (source domain) and unlabeled new images (target domain) are similar but not identical. It impedes a change detection model learned from source domains being well applied to the target domain. In this paper, we propose a transferred deep learning-based change detection framework to solve this problem. It consists of pretraining and fine-tuning stages. In the pretraining process, we propose two tasks to be learned simultaneously, namely, change detection for the source domain with labels and reconstruction of the unlabeled target data. The auxiliary task aims to reconstruct the difference image (DI) for the target domain. DI is an effective feature, such that the auxiliary task is of much relevance to change detection. The lower layers are shared between these two tasks in the training process. It mitigates the distribution discrepancy between the source and target domains and makes the concept of change from the source domain adapt to the target domain. In addition, we evaluate three modes of the U-net architecture to merge the information for a pair of patches. To fine-tune the change detection network (CDN) for the target domain, two strategies are exploited to select the pixels that have a high possibility of being correctly classified by an unsupervised approach. The proposed method demonstrates an excellent capacity for adapting the concept of change from the source domain to the target domain. It outperforms the state-of-the-art change detection methods via experimental results on real remote sensing data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]