EarthDial: Turning Multi-sensory Earth Observations to Interactive Dialogues

Automated analysis of vast Earth observation data via interactive Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can unlock new opportunities for environmental monitoring, disaster response, and resource management. Existing generic VLMs do not perform well on Remote Sensing data, while the recent Geo-spatial VLMs remain restricted to a fixed resolution and few sensor modalities. In this paper, we introduce EarthDial, a conversational assistant specifically designed for Earth Observation (EO) data, transforming complex, multi-sensory Earth observations into interactive, natural language dialogues. EarthDial supports multi-spectral, multi-temporal, and multi-resolution imagery, enabling a wide range of remote sensing tasks, including classification, detection, captioning, question answering, visual reasoning, and visual grounding. To achieve this, we introduce an extensive instruction tuning dataset comprising over 11.11M instruction pairs covering RGB, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and multispectral modalities such as Near-Infrared (NIR) and infrared. Furthermore, EarthDial handles bi-temporal and multi-temporal sequence analysis for applications like change detection. Our extensive experimental results on 37 downstream applications demonstrate that EarthDial outperforms existing generic and domain-specific models, achieving better generalization across various EO tasks.

CLIP meets DINO for Tuning Zero-Shot Classifier using Unlabeled Image Collections

In the era of foundation models, CLIP has emerged as a powerful tool for aligning text and visual modalities into a common embedding space. However, the alignment objective used to train CLIP often results in subpar visual features for fine-grained tasks. In contrast, SSL-pretrained models like DINO excel at extracting rich visual features due to their specialized training paradigm. Yet, these SSL models require an additional supervised linear probing step, which relies on fully labeled data which is often expensive and difficult to obtain at scale. In this paper, we propose a label-free prompt-tuning method that leverages the rich visual features of self-supervised learning models (DINO) and the broad textual knowledge of large language models (LLMs) to largely enhance CLIP-based image classification performance using unlabeled images. Our approach unfolds in three key steps: (1) We generate robust textual feature embeddings that more accurately represent object classes by leveraging class-specific descriptions from LLMs, enabling more effective zero-shot classification compared to CLIP's default name-specific prompts. (2) These textual embeddings are then used to produce pseudo-labels to train an alignment module that integrates the complementary strengths of LLM description-based textual embeddings and DINO's visual features. (3) Finally, we prompt-tune CLIP's vision encoder through DINO-assisted supervision using the trained alignment module. This three-step process allows us to harness the best of visual and textual foundation models, resulting in a powerful and efficient approach that surpasses state-of-the-art label-free classification methods. Notably, our framework, NoLA (No Labels Attached), achieves an average absolute gain of 3.6% over the state-of-the-art LaFter across 11 diverse image classification datasets.

COSNet: A Novel Semantic Segmentation Network using Enhanced Boundaries in Cluttered Scenes

Automated waste recycling aims to efficiently separate the recyclable objects from the waste by employing vision-based systems. However, the presence of varying shaped objects having different material types makes it a challenging problem, especially in cluttered environments. Existing segmentation methods perform reasonably on many semantic segmentation datasets by employing multi-contextual representations, however, their performance is degraded when utilized for waste object segmentation in cluttered scenarios. In addition, plastic objects further increase the complexity of the problem due to their translucent nature. To address these limitations, we introduce an efficacious segmentation network, named COSNet, that uses boundary cues along with multi-contextual information to accurately segment the objects in cluttered scenes. COSNet introduces novel components including feature sharpening block (FSB) and boundary enhancement module (BEM) for enhancing the features and highlighting the boundary information of irregular waste objects in cluttered environment. Extensive experiments on three challenging datasets including ZeroWaste-f, SpectralWaste, and ADE20K demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our COSNet achieves a significant gain of 1.8% on ZeroWaste-f and 2.1% on SpectralWaste datasets respectively in terms of mIoU metric.

Improving 3D Medical Image Segmentation at Boundary Regions using Local Self-attention and Global Volume Mixing

Volumetric medical image segmentation is a fundamental problem in medical image analysis where the objective is to accurately classify a given 3D volumetric medical image with voxel-level precision. In this work, we propose a novel hierarchical encoder-decoder-based framework that strives to explicitly capture the local and global dependencies for volumetric 3D medical image segmentation. The proposed framework exploits local volume-based self-attention to encode the local dependencies at high resolution and introduces a novel volumetric MLP-mixer to capture the global dependencies at low-resolution feature representations, respectively. The proposed volumetric MLP-mixer learns better associations among volumetric feature representations. These explicit local and global feature representations contribute to better learning of the shape-boundary characteristics of the organs. Extensive experiments on three different datasets reveal that the proposed method achieves favorable performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. On the challenging Synapse Multi-organ dataset, the proposed method achieves an absolute 3.82\% gain over the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of HD95 evaluation metrics {while a similar improvement pattern is exhibited in MSD Liver and Pancreas tumor datasets}. We also provide a detailed comparison between recent architectural design choices in the 2D computer vision literature by adapting them for the problem of 3D medical image segmentation. Finally, our experiments on the ZebraFish 3D cell membrane dataset having limited training data demonstrate the superior transfer learning capabilities of the proposed vMixer model on the challenging 3D cell instance segmentation task, where accurate boundary prediction plays a vital role in distinguishing individual cell instances.

A Survey of the Self Supervised Learning Mechanisms for Vision Transformers

Deep supervised learning models require high volume of labeled data to attain sufficiently good results. Although, the practice of gathering and annotating such big data is costly and laborious. Recently, the application of self supervised learning (SSL) in vision tasks has gained significant attention. The intuition behind SSL is to exploit the synchronous relationships within the data as a form of self-supervision, which can be versatile. In the current big data era, most of the data is unlabeled, and the success of SSL thus relies in finding ways to improve this vast amount of unlabeled data available. Thus its better for deep learning algorithms to reduce reliance on human supervision and instead focus on self-supervision based on the inherent relationships within the data. With the advent of ViTs, which have achieved remarkable results in computer vision, it is crucial to explore and understand the various SSL mechanisms employed for training these models specifically in scenarios where there is less label data available. In this survey we thus develop a comprehensive taxonomy of systematically classifying the SSL techniques based upon their representations and pre-training tasks being applied. Additionally, we discuss the motivations behind SSL, review popular pre-training tasks, and highlight the challenges and advancements in this field. Furthermore, we present a comparative analysis of different SSL methods, evaluate their strengths and limitations, and identify potential avenues for future research.

FANet: Feature Amplification Network for Semantic Segmentation in Cluttered Background

Existing deep learning approaches leave out the semantic cues that are crucial in semantic segmentation present in complex scenarios including cluttered backgrounds and translucent objects, etc. To handle these challenges, we propose a feature amplification network (FANet) as a backbone network that incorporates semantic information using a novel feature enhancement module at multi-stages. To achieve this, we propose an adaptive feature enhancement (AFE) block that benefits from both a spatial context module (SCM) and a feature refinement module (FRM) in a parallel fashion. SCM aims to exploit larger kernel leverages for the increased receptive field to handle scale variations in the scene. Whereas our novel FRM is responsible for generating semantic cues that can capture both low-frequency and high-frequency regions for better segmentation tasks. We perform experiments over challenging real-world ZeroWaste-f dataset which contains background-cluttered and translucent objects. Our experimental results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods.

Medical Image Segmentation Using Directional Window Attention

Accurate segmentation of medical images is crucial for diagnostic purposes, including cell segmentation, tumor identification, and organ localization. Traditional convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approaches struggled to achieve precise segmentation results due to their limited receptive fields, particularly in cases involving multi-organ segmentation with varying shapes and sizes. The transformer-based approaches address this limitation by leveraging the global receptive field, but they often face challenges in capturing local information required for pixel-precise segmentation. In this work, we introduce DwinFormer, a hierarchical encoder-decoder architecture for medical image segmentation comprising a directional window (Dwin) attention and global self-attention (GSA) for feature encoding. The focus of our design is the introduction of Dwin block within DwinFormer that effectively captures local and global information along the horizontal, vertical, and depthwise directions of the input feature map by separately performing attention in each of these directional volumes. To this end, our Dwin block introduces a nested Dwin attention (NDA) that progressively increases the receptive field in horizontal, vertical, and depthwise directions and a convolutional Dwin attention (CDA) that captures local contextual information for the attention computation. While the proposed Dwin block captures local and global dependencies at the first two high-resolution stages of DwinFormer, the GSA block encodes global dependencies at the last two lower-resolution stages. Experiments over the challenging 3D Synapse Multi-organ dataset and Cell HMS dataset demonstrate the benefits of our DwinFormer over the state-of-the-art approaches. Our source code will be publicly available at \url{https://github.com/Daniyanaj/DWINFORMER}.

ChangeBind: A Hybrid Change Encoder for Remote Sensing Change Detection

Change detection (CD) is a fundamental task in remote sensing (RS) which aims to detect the semantic changes between the same geographical regions at different time stamps. Existing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based approaches often struggle to capture long-range dependencies. Whereas recent transformer-based methods are prone to the dominant global representation and may limit their capabilities to capture the subtle change regions due to the complexity of the objects in the scene. To address these limitations, we propose an effective Siamese-based framework to encode the semantic changes occurring in the bi-temporal RS images. The main focus of our design is to introduce a change encoder that leverages local and global feature representations to capture both subtle and large change feature information from multi-scale features to precisely estimate the change regions. Our experimental study on two challenging CD datasets reveals the merits of our approach and obtains state-of-the-art performance.

ELGC-Net: Efficient Local-Global Context Aggregation for Remote Sensing Change Detection

Deep learning has shown remarkable success in remote sensing change detection (CD), aiming to identify semantic change regions between co-registered satellite image pairs acquired at distinct time stamps. However, existing convolutional neural network and transformer-based frameworks often struggle to accurately segment semantic change regions. Moreover, transformers-based methods with standard self-attention suffer from quadratic computational complexity with respect to the image resolution, making them less practical for CD tasks with limited training data. To address these issues, we propose an efficient change detection framework, ELGC-Net, which leverages rich contextual information to precisely estimate change regions while reducing the model size. Our ELGC-Net comprises a Siamese encoder, fusion modules, and a decoder. The focus of our design is the introduction of an Efficient Local-Global Context Aggregator module within the encoder, capturing enhanced global context and local spatial information through a novel pooled-transpose (PT) attention and depthwise convolution, respectively. The PT attention employs pooling operations for robust feature extraction and minimizes computational cost with transposed attention. Extensive experiments on three challenging CD datasets demonstrate that ELGC-Net outperforms existing methods. Compared to the recent transformer-based CD approach (ChangeFormer), ELGC-Net achieves a 1.4% gain in intersection over union metric on the LEVIR-CD dataset, while significantly reducing trainable parameters. Our proposed ELGC-Net sets a new state-of-the-art performance in remote sensing change detection benchmarks. Finally, we also introduce ELGC-Net-LW, a lighter variant with significantly reduced computational complexity, suitable for resource-constrained settings, while achieving comparable performance. Project url https://github.com/techmn/elgcnet.

DDAM-PS: Diligent Domain Adaptive Mixer for Person Search

Person search (PS) is a challenging computer vision problem where the objective is to achieve joint optimization for pedestrian detection and re-identification (ReID). Although previous advancements have shown promising performance in the field under fully and weakly supervised learning fashion, there exists a major gap in investigating the domain adaptation ability of PS models. In this paper, we propose a diligent domain adaptive mixer (DDAM) for person search (DDAP-PS) framework that aims to bridge a gap to improve knowledge transfer from the labeled source domain to the unlabeled target domain. Specifically, we introduce a novel DDAM module that generates moderate mixed-domain representations by combining source and target domain representations. The proposed DDAM module encourages domain mixing to minimize the distance between the two extreme domains, thereby enhancing the ReID task. To achieve this, we introduce two bridge losses and a disparity loss. The objective of the two bridge losses is to guide the moderate mixed-domain representations to maintain an appropriate distance from both the source and target domain representations. The disparity loss aims to prevent the moderate mixed-domain representations from being biased towards either the source or target domains, thereby avoiding overfitting. Furthermore, we address the conflict between the two subtasks, localization and ReID, during domain adaptation. To handle this cross-task conflict, we forcefully decouple the norm-aware embedding, which aids in better learning of the moderate mixed-domain representation. We conduct experiments to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our approach demonstrates favorable performance on the challenging PRW and CUHK-SYSU datasets. Our source code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/mustansarfiaz/DDAM-PS}.