REMM:Rotation-Equivariant Framework for End-to-End Multimodal Image Matching

We present REMM, a rotation-equivariant framework for end-to-end multimodal image matching, which fully encodes rotational differences of descriptors in the whole matching pipeline. Previous learning-based methods mainly focus on extracting modal-invariant descriptors, while consistently ignoring the rotational invariance. In this paper, we demonstrate that our REMM is very useful for multimodal image matching, including multimodal feature learning module and cyclic shift module. We first learn modal-invariant features through the multimodal feature learning module. Then, we design the cyclic shift module to rotationally encode the descriptors, greatly improving the performance of rotation-equivariant matching, which makes them robust to any angle. To validate our method, we establish a comprehensive rotation and scale-matching benchmark for evaluating the anti-rotation performance of multimodal images, which contains a combination of multi-angle and multi-scale transformations from four publicly available datasets. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing methods in benchmarking and generalizes well to independent datasets. Additionally, we conducted an in-depth analysis of the key components of the REMM to validate the improvements brought about by the cyclic shift module. Code and dataset at https://github.com/HanNieWHU/REMM.

Source-free Domain Adaptive Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Recent studies have used unsupervised domain adaptive object detection (UDAOD) methods to bridge the domain gap in remote sensing (RS) images. However, UDAOD methods typically assume that the source domain data can be accessed during the domain adaptation process. This setting is often impractical in the real world due to RS data privacy and transmission difficulty. To address this challenge, we propose a practical source-free object detection (SFOD) setting for RS images, which aims to perform target domain adaptation using only the source pre-trained model. We propose a new SFOD method for RS images consisting of two parts: perturbed domain generation and alignment. The proposed multilevel perturbation constructs the perturbed domain in a simple yet efficient form by perturbing the domain-variant features at the image level and feature level according to the color and style bias. The proposed multilevel alignment calculates feature and label consistency between the perturbed domain and the target domain across the teacher-student network, and introduces the distillation of feature prototype to mitigate the noise of pseudo-labels. By requiring the detector to be consistent in the perturbed domain and the target domain, the detector is forced to focus on domaininvariant features. Extensive results of three synthetic-to-real experiments and three cross-sensor experiments have validated the effectiveness of our method which does not require access to source domain RS images. Furthermore, experiments on computer vision datasets show that our method can be extended to other fields as well. Our code will be available at: https://weixliu.github.io/ .

Can Synthetic Data Improve Object Detection Results for Remote Sensing Images?

Deep learning approaches require enough training samples to perform well, but it is a challenge to collect enough real training data and label them manually. In this letter, we propose the use of realistic synthetic data with a wide distribution to improve the performance of remote sensing image aircraft detection. Specifically, to increase the variability of synthetic data, we randomly set the parameters during rendering, such as the size of the instance and the class of background images. In order to make the synthetic images more realistic, we then refine the synthetic images at the pixel level using CycleGAN with real unlabeled images. We also fine-tune the model with a small amount of real data, to obtain a higher accuracy. Experiments on NWPU VHR-10, UCAS-AOD and DIOR datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can be applied for augmenting insufficient real data.