CoMiX: Cross-Modal Fusion with Deformable Convolutions for HSI-X Semantic Segmentation

Improving hyperspectral image (HSI) semantic segmentation by exploiting complementary information from a supplementary data type (referred to X-modality) is promising but challenging due to differences in imaging sensors, image content, and resolution. Current techniques struggle to enhance modality-specific and modality-shared information, as well as to capture dynamic interaction and fusion between different modalities. In response, this study proposes CoMiX, an asymmetric encoder-decoder architecture with deformable convolutions (DCNs) for HSI-X semantic segmentation. CoMiX is designed to extract, calibrate, and fuse information from HSI and X data. Its pipeline includes an encoder with two parallel and interacting backbones and a lightweight all-multilayer perceptron (ALL-MLP) decoder. The encoder consists of four stages, each incorporating 2D DCN blocks for the X model to accommodate geometric variations and 3D DCN blocks for HSIs to adaptively aggregate spatial-spectral features. Additionally, each stage includes a Cross-Modality Feature enhancement and eXchange (CMFeX) module and a feature fusion module (FFM). CMFeX is designed to exploit spatial-spectral correlations from different modalities to recalibrate and enhance modality-specific and modality-shared features while adaptively exchanging complementary information between them. Outputs from CMFeX are fed into the FFM for fusion and passed to the next stage for further information learning. Finally, the outputs from each FFM are integrated by the ALL-MLP decoder for final prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CoMiX achieves superior performance and generalizes well to various multimodal recognition tasks. The CoMiX code will be released.

Local-to-Global Cross-Modal Attention-Aware Fusion for HSI-X Semantic Segmentation

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has recently reached its performance bottleneck. Multimodal data fusion is emerging as a promising approach to overcome this bottleneck by providing rich complementary information from the supplementary modality (X-modality). However, achieving comprehensive cross-modal interaction and fusion that can be generalized across different sensing modalities is challenging due to the disparity in imaging sensors, resolution, and content of different modalities. In this study, we propose a Local-to-Global Cross-modal Attention-aware Fusion (LoGoCAF) framework for HSI-X classification that jointly considers efficiency, accuracy, and generalizability. LoGoCAF adopts a pixel-to-pixel two-branch semantic segmentation architecture to learn information from HSI and X modalities. The pipeline of LoGoCAF consists of a local-to-global encoder and a lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP) decoder. In the encoder, convolutions are used to encode local and high-resolution fine details in shallow layers, while transformers are used to integrate global and low-resolution coarse features in deeper layers. The MLP decoder aggregates information from the encoder for feature fusion and prediction. In particular, two cross-modality modules, the feature enhancement module (FEM) and the feature interaction and fusion module (FIFM), are introduced in each encoder stage. The FEM is used to enhance complementary information by combining the feature from the other modality across direction-aware, position-sensitive, and channel-wise dimensions. With the enhanced features, the FIFM is designed to promote cross-modality information interaction and fusion for the final semantic prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LoGoCAF achieves superior performance and generalizes well. The code will be made publicly available.

OBSUM: An object-based spatial unmixing model for spatiotemporal fusion of remote sensing images

Spatiotemporal fusion aims to improve both the spatial and temporal resolution of remote sensing images, thus facilitating time-series analysis at a fine spatial scale. However, there are several important issues that limit the application of current spatiotemporal fusion methods. First, most spatiotemporal fusion methods are based on pixel-level computation, which neglects the valuable object-level information of the land surface. Moreover, many existing methods cannot accurately retrieve strong temporal changes between the available high-resolution image at base date and the predicted one. This study proposes an Object-Based Spatial Unmixing Model (OBSUM), which incorporates object-based image analysis and spatial unmixing, to overcome the two abovementioned problems. OBSUM consists of one preprocessing step and three fusion steps, i.e., object-level unmixing, object-level residual compensation, and pixel-level residual compensation. OBSUM can be applied using only one fine image at the base date and one coarse image at the prediction date, without the need of a coarse image at the base date. The performance of OBSUM was compared with five representative spatiotemporal fusion methods. The experimental results demonstrated that OBSUM outperformed other methods in terms of both accuracy indices and visual effects over time-series. Furthermore, OBSUM also achieved satisfactory results in two typical remote sensing applications. Therefore, it has great potential to generate accurate and high-resolution time-series observations for supporting various remote sensing applications.

Unsupervised CD in satellite image time series by contrastive learning and feature tracking

While unsupervised change detection using contrastive learning has been significantly improved the performance of literature techniques, at present, it only focuses on the bi-temporal change detection scenario. Previous state-of-the-art models for image time-series change detection often use features obtained by learning for clustering or training a model from scratch using pseudo labels tailored to each scene. However, these approaches fail to exploit the spatial-temporal information of image time-series or generalize to unseen scenarios. In this work, we propose a two-stage approach to unsupervised change detection in satellite image time-series using contrastive learning with feature tracking. By deriving pseudo labels from pre-trained models and using feature tracking to propagate them among the image time-series, we improve the consistency of our pseudo labels and address the challenges of seasonal changes in long-term remote sensing image time-series. We adopt the self-training algorithm with ConvLSTM on the obtained pseudo labels, where we first use supervised contrastive loss and contrastive random walks to further improve the feature correspondence in space-time. Then a fully connected layer is fine-tuned on the pre-trained multi-temporal features for generating the final change maps. Through comprehensive experiments on two datasets, we demonstrate consistent improvements in accuracy on fitting and inference scenarios.

Incomplete Multimodal Learning for Remote Sensing Data Fusion

The mechanism of connecting multimodal signals through self-attention operation is a key factor in the success of multimodal Transformer networks in remote sensing data fusion tasks. However, traditional approaches assume access to all modalities during both training and inference, which can lead to severe degradation when dealing with modal-incomplete inputs in downstream applications. To address this limitation, our proposed approach introduces a novel model for incomplete multimodal learning in the context of remote sensing data fusion. This approach can be used in both supervised and self-supervised pretraining paradigms and leverages the additional learned fusion tokens in combination with Bi-LSTM attention and masked self-attention mechanisms to collect multimodal signals. The proposed approach employs reconstruction and contrastive loss to facilitate fusion in pre-training while allowing for random modality combinations as inputs in network training. Our approach delivers state-of-the-art performance on two multimodal datasets for tasks such as building instance / semantic segmentation and land-cover mapping tasks when dealing with incomplete inputs during inference.

Joint Spatio-Temporal Modeling for the Semantic Change Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Semantic Change Detection (SCD) refers to the task of simultaneously extracting the changed areas and the semantic categories (before and after the changes) in Remote Sensing Images (RSIs). This is more meaningful than Binary Change Detection (BCD) since it enables detailed change analysis in the observed areas. Previous works established triple-branch Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures as the paradigm for SCD. However, it remains challenging to exploit semantic information with a limited amount of change samples. In this work, we investigate to jointly consider the spatio-temporal dependencies to improve the accuracy of SCD. First, we propose a Semantic Change Transformer (SCanFormer) to explicitly model the 'from-to' semantic transitions between the bi-temporal RSIs. Then, we introduce a semantic learning scheme to leverage the spatio-temporal constraints, which are coherent to the SCD task, to guide the learning of semantic changes. The resulting network (SCanNet) significantly outperforms the baseline method in terms of both detection of critical semantic changes and semantic consistency in the obtained bi-temporal results. It achieves the SOTA accuracy on two benchmark datasets for the SCD.

Bi-Temporal Semantic Reasoning for the Semantic Change Detection in HR Remote Sensing Images

Semantic change detection (SCD) extends the multi-class change detection (MCD) task to provide not only the change locations but also the detailed land-cover/land-use (LCLU) categories before and after the observation intervals. This fine-grained semantic change information is very useful in many applications. Recent studies indicate that the SCD can be modeled through a triple-branch Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which contains two temporal branches and a change branch. However, in this architecture, the communications between the temporal branches and the change branch are insufficient. To overcome the limitations in existing methods, we propose a novel CNN architecture for the SCD, where the semantic temporal features are merged in a deep CD unit. Furthermore, we elaborate on this architecture to reason the bi-temporal semantic correlations. The resulting Bi-temporal Semantic Reasoning Network (Bi-SRNet) contains two types of semantic reasoning blocks to reason both single-temporal and cross-temporal semantic correlations, as well as a novel loss function to improve the semantic consistency of change detection results. Experimental results on a benchmark dataset show that the proposed architecture obtains significant accuracy improvements over the existing approaches, while the added designs in the Bi-SRNet further improves the segmentation of both semantic categories and the changed areas. The codes in this paper are accessible at: github.com/ggsDing/Bi-SRNet.

Looking Outside the Window: Wide-Context Transformer for the Semantic Segmentation of High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Long-range context information is crucial for the semantic segmentation of High-Resolution (HR) Remote Sensing Images (RSIs). The image cropping operations, commonly used for training neural networks, limit the perception of long-range context information in large RSIs. To break this limitation, we propose a Wide-Context Network (WiCoNet) for the semantic segmentation of HR RSIs. In the WiCoNet, apart from a conventional feature extraction network that aggregates the local information, an extra context branch is designed to explicitly model the spatial information in a larger image area. The information between the two branches is communicated through a Context Transformer, which is a novel design derived from the Vision Transformer to model the long-range context correlations. Ablation studies and comparative experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. In addition, we present a new Beijing Land-Use (BLU) dataset. This is a large-scale HR satellite dataset provided with high-quality and fine-grained reference labels, which can boost future studies in this field.

Recent Advances in Domain Adaptation for the Classification of Remote Sensing Data

The success of supervised classification of remotely sensed images acquired over large geographical areas or at short time intervals strongly depends on the representativity of the samples used to train the classification algorithm and to define the model. When training samples are collected from an image (or a spatial region) different from the one used for mapping, spectral shifts between the two distributions are likely to make the model fail. Such shifts are generally due to differences in acquisition and atmospheric conditions or to changes in the nature of the object observed. In order to design classification methods that are robust to data-set shifts, recent remote sensing literature has considered solutions based on domain adaptation (DA) approaches. Inspired by machine learning literature, several DA methods have been proposed to solve specific problems in remote sensing data classification. This paper provides a critical review of the recent advances in DA for remote sensing and presents an overview of methods divided into four categories: i) invariant feature selection; ii) representation matching; iii) adaptation of classifiers and iv) selective sampling. We provide an overview of recent methodologies, as well as examples of application of the considered techniques to real remote sensing images characterized by very high spatial and spectral resolution. Finally, we propose guidelines to the selection of the method to use in real application scenarios.

Robust Registration of Multimodal Remote Sensing Images Based on Structural Similarity

Automatic registration of multimodal remote sensing data (e.g., optical, LiDAR, SAR) is a challenging task due to the significant non-linear radiometric differences between these data. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel feature descriptor named the Histogram of Orientated Phase Congruency (HOPC), which is based on the structural properties of images. Furthermore, a similarity metric named HOPCncc is defined, which uses the normalized correlation coefficient (NCC) of the HOPC descriptors for multimodal registration. In the definition of the proposed similarity metric, we first extend the phase congruency model to generate its orientation representation, and use the extended model to build HOPCncc. Then a fast template matching scheme for this metric is designed to detect the control points between images. The proposed HOPCncc aims to capture the structural similarity between images, and has been tested with a variety of optical, LiDAR, SAR and map data. The results show that HOPCncc is robust against complex non-linear radiometric differences and outperforms the state-of-the-art similarities metrics (i.e., NCC and mutual information) in matching performance. Moreover, a robust registration method is also proposed in this paper based on HOPCncc, which is evaluated using six pairs of multimodal remote sensing images. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for multimodal image registration.