Hi-ResNet: A High-Resolution Remote Sensing Network for Semantic Segmentation

High-resolution remote sensing (HRS) semantic segmentation extracts key objects from high-resolution coverage areas. However, objects of the same category within HRS images generally show significant differences in scale and shape across diverse geographical environments, making it difficult to fit the data distribution. Additionally, a complex background environment causes similar appearances of objects of different categories, which precipitates a substantial number of objects into misclassification as background. These issues make existing learning algorithms sub-optimal. In this work, we solve the above-mentioned problems by proposing a High-resolution remote sensing network (Hi-ResNet) with efficient network structure designs, which consists of a funnel module, a multi-branch module with stacks of information aggregation (IA) blocks, and a feature refinement module, sequentially, and Class-agnostic Edge Aware (CEA) loss. Specifically, we propose a funnel module to downsample, which reduces the computational cost, and extract high-resolution semantic information from the initial input image. Secondly, we downsample the processed feature images into multi-resolution branches incrementally to capture image features at different scales and apply IA blocks, which capture key latent information by leveraging attention mechanisms, for effective feature aggregation, distinguishing image features of the same class with variant scales and shapes. Finally, our feature refinement module integrate the CEA loss function, which disambiguates inter-class objects with similar shapes and increases the data distribution distance for correct predictions. With effective pre-training strategies, we demonstrated the superiority of Hi-ResNet over state-of-the-art methods on three HRS segmentation benchmarks.

MFR 2021: Masked Face Recognition Competition

This paper presents a summary of the Masked Face Recognition Competitions (MFR) held within the 2021 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2021). The competition attracted a total of 10 participating teams with valid submissions. The affiliations of these teams are diverse and associated with academia and industry in nine different countries. These teams successfully submitted 18 valid solutions. The competition is designed to motivate solutions aiming at enhancing the face recognition accuracy of masked faces. Moreover, the competition considered the deployability of the proposed solutions by taking the compactness of the face recognition models into account. A private dataset representing a collaborative, multi-session, real masked, capture scenario is used to evaluate the submitted solutions. In comparison to one of the top-performing academic face recognition solutions, 10 out of the 18 submitted solutions did score higher masked face verification accuracy.