Road extraction from aerial images has been a hot research topic in the field of remote sensing image analysis. In this letter, a semantic segmentation neural network, which combines the strengths of residual learning and U-Net, is proposed for road area extraction. The network is built with residual units and has similar architecture to that of U-Net. The benefits of this model are twofold: first, residual units ease training of deep networks. Second, the rich skip connections within the network could facilitate information propagation, allowing us to design networks with fewer parameters, however, better performance. We test our network on a public road data set and compare it with U-Net and other two state-of-the-art deep-learning-based road extraction methods. The proposed approach outperforms all the comparing methods, which demonstrates its superiority over recently developed state of the arts.

This article addresses the problem of remote sensing image pan-sharpening from the perspective of generative adversarial learning. We propose a novel deep neural network-based method named pansharpening GAN (PSGAN). To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first attempts at producing high-quality pan-sharpened images with generative adversarial networks (GANs). The PSGAN consists of two components: a generative network (i.e., generator) and a discriminative network (i.e., discriminator). The generator is designed to accept panchromatic (PAN) and multispectral (MS) images as inputs and maps them to the desired high-resolution (HR) MS images, and the discriminator implements the adversarial training strategy for generating higher fidelity pan-sharpened images. In this article, we evaluate several architectures and designs, namely, two-stream input, stacking input, batch normalization layer, and attention mechanism to find the optimal solution for pan-sharpening. Extensive experiments on QuickBird, GaoFen-2, and WorldView-2 satellite images demonstrate that the proposed PSGANs not only are effective in generating high-quality HR MS images and superior to state-of-the-art methods but also generalize well to full-scale images.

Ship detection is an important and challenging task in remote sensing applications. Most methods utilize specially designed hand-crafted features to detect ships, and they usually work well only on one scale, which lack generalization and impractical to identify ships with various scales from multiresolution images. In this paper, we propose a novel deep feature-based method to detect ships in very high-resolution optical remote sensing images. In our method, a regional proposal network is used to generate ship candidates from feature maps produced by a deep convolutional neural network. To efficiently detect ships with various scales, a hierarchical selective filtering layer is proposed to map features in different scales to the same scale space. The proposed method is an end-to-end network that can detect both inshore and offshore ships ranging from dozens of pixels to thousands. We test our network on a large ship data set which will be released in the future, consisting of Google Earth images, GaoFen-2 images, and unmanned aerial vehicle data. Experiments demonstrate high precision and robustness of our method. Further experiments on aerial images show its good generalization to unseen scenes.

Traditional change detection methods usually follow the image differencing, change feature extraction, and classification framework, and their performance is limited by such simple image domain differencing and also the hand-crafted features. Recently, the success of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has widely spread across the whole field of computer vision for their powerful representation abilities. Therefore, in this article, we address the remote sensing image change detection problem with deep learning techniques. We first propose an end-to-end dual-branch architecture, termed the W-Net, with each branch taking as input one of the two bitemporal images as in the traditional change detection models. In this way, CNN features with more powerful representative abilities can be obtained to boost the final detection performance. In addition, W-Net performs differencing in the feature domain rather than in the traditional image domain, which greatly alleviates loss of useful information for determining the changes. Furthermore, by reformulating change detection as an image translation problem, we apply the recently popular generative adversarial network (GAN) in which our W-Net serves as the generator, leading to a new GAN architecture for change detection which we call CDGAN. To train our networks and also facilitate future research, we construct a large scale data set by collecting images from Google Earth and provide carefully manually annotated ground truths. Experiments show that our proposed methods can provide fine-grained change detection results superior to the existing state-of-the-art baselines.

Detecting objects from aerial images poses significant challenges due to the following factors: 1) Aerial images typically have very large sizes, generally with millions or even hundreds of millions of pixels, while computational resources are limited. 2) Small object size leads to insufficient information for effective detection. 3) Non-uniform object distribution leads to computational resource wastage. To address these issues, we propose YOLC (You Only Look Clusters), an efficient and effective framework that builds on an anchor-free object detector, CenterNet. To overcome the challenges posed by large-scale images and non-uniform object distribution, we introduce a Local Scale Module (LSM) that adaptively searches cluster regions for zooming in for accurate detection. Additionally, we modify the regression loss using Gaussian Wasserstein distance (GWD) to obtain high-quality bounding boxes. Deformable convolution and refinement methods are employed in the detection head to enhance the detection of small objects. We perform extensive experiments on two aerial image datasets, including Visdrone2019 and UAVDT, to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed approach.

In this letter, we address the problem of change detection for remote sensing images from the perspective of visual saliency computation. The proposed method incorporates low-rank-based saliency computation and deep feature representation. First, multilevel convolutional neural network (CNN) features are extracted for superpixels generated using SLIC, in which a fixed-size CNN feature can be formed to represent each superpixel. Then, low-rank decomposition is applied to the change features of the two input images to generate saliency maps that indicate change probabilities of each pixel. Finally, binarized change map can be obtained with a simple threshold. To deal with scale variations, a multiscale fusion strategy is employed to produce more reliable detection results. Extensive experiments on Google Earth and GF-2 images demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.