Crack detection is an indispensable premise of road maintenance, which can provide early warning information for many road damages and save repair costs to a large extent. Because of the security and convenience, many image processing technique (IPT) based crack detection methods have been proposed, but their performances often cannot meet the requirements of practical applications because of the complex texture structure and seriously imbalanced categories. To address the aforementioned problem, we present an external attention based TransUNet for crack detection. Specifically, we tackle the TransUNet as the backbone of our detection framework, which can propagate the detailed texture information from shallow layers to corresponding deep layers through skip connections. Besides, the Transformer Block equipped in the second last convolution layer of the encoding component can explicitly model the long-range dependency of different regions in an image, which improves the structural representation ability of the framework and hence alleviates the interference from shadow, noise, and other negative factors. In addition, the External Attention Block equipped in the last convolution layer of the encoding component can effectively exploit the dependency of crack regions among different images, and further enhance the robustness of the framework. Finally, combined with the Focal Loss, the proposed label expansion strategy can further alleviate the category imbalance problem through transforming semantic categories of non-crack pixels distributed in the neighbors of corresponding crack pixels.

Hyperspectral anomaly detection (HAD) is an important technique used to identify objects with spectral irregularity that can contribute to object-based image analysis. Latterly, significant attention has been given to HAD methods based on Autoencoders (AE). Nevertheless, due to a lack of prior information, transferring of modeling capacity, and the “curse of dimensionality”, AE-based detectors still have limited performance. To address the drawbacks, we propose a Multi-Prior Graph Autoencoder (MPGAE) with ranking-based band selection for HAD. There are three main components: the ranking-based band selection component, the adaptive salient weight component, and the graph autoencoder. First, the ranking-based band selection component removes redundant spectral channels by ranking the bands by employing piecewise-smooth first. Then, the adaptive salient weight component adjusts the reconstruction ability of the AE based on the salient prior, by calculating spectral-spatial features of the local context and the multivariate normal distribution of backgrounds. Finally, to preserve the geometric structure in the latent space, the graph autoencoder detects anomalies by obtaining reconstruction errors with a superpixel segmentation-based graph regularization. In particular, the loss function utilizes ${\ell }_{2,1}-\mathrm{norm}$ and adaptive salient weight to enhance the capacity of modeling anomaly patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MPGAE effectively outperforms other state-of-the-art HAD detectors.

An airborne hyperspectral imaging system is typically equipped on an aircraft or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to capture ground scenes from an overlooking perspective. Due to the rotation of the aircraft or UAV, the same region of land cover may be imaged from different viewing angles. While humans can accurately recognize the same objects from different viewing angles, classification methods based on spectral-spatial features for airborne hyperspectral images exhibit significant errors. The existing methods primarily involve incorporating image or feature rotation angles into the network to improve its accuracy in classifying rotated images. However, these methods introduce additional parameters that need to be manually determined, which may not be optimal for all applications. This paper presents a spectral-spatial attention rotation-invariant classification network for the airborne hyperspectral image to address this issue. The proposed method does not require the introduction of additional rotation angle parameters. There are three modules in the proposed framework: the band selection module, the local spatial feature enhancement module, and the lightweight feature enhancement module. The band selection module suppresses redundant spectral channels, while the local spatial feature enhancement module generates a multi-angle parallel feature encoding network to improve the discrimination of the center pixel. The multi-angle parallel feature encoding network also learns the position relationship between each pixel, thus maintaining rotation invariance. The lightweight feature enhancement module is the last layer of the framework, which enhances important features and suppresses insignificance features. At the same time, a dynamically weighted cross-entropy loss is utilized as the loss function. This loss function adjusts the model’s sensitivity for samples with different categories according to the output in the training epoch. The proposed method is evaluated on five airborne hyperspectral image datasets covering urban and agricultural regions. Compared with other state-of-the-art classification algorithms, the method achieves the best classification accuracy and is capable of effectively extracting rotation-invariant features for urban and rural areas.

Dams in their natural environment will gradually develop cracks and other forms of damage. If not detected and repaired in time, the structural strength of the dam may be reduced, and it may even collapse. Repairing cracks and defects in dams is very important to ensure their normal operation. Traditional detection methods rely on manual inspection, which consumes a lot of time and labor, while deep learning methods can greatly alleviate this problem. However, previous studies have often focused on how to better detect crack defects, with the corresponding image resolution not being particularly high. In this study, targeting the scenario of real-time detection by drones, we propose an automatic detection method for dam crack targets directly on high-resolution remote sensing images. First, for high-resolution remote sensing images, we designed a sliding window processing method and proposed corresponding methods to eliminate redundant detection frames. Then, we introduced a Gaussian distribution in the loss function to calculate the similarity of predicted frames and incorporated a self-attention mechanism in the spatial pooling module to further enhance the detection performance of crack targets at various scales. Finally, we proposed a pruning-after-distillation scheme, using the compressed model as the student and the pre-compression model as the teacher and proposed a joint distillation method that allows more efficient distillation under this compression relationship between teacher and student models. Ultimately, a high-performance target detection model can be deployed in a more lightweight form for field operations such as UAV patrols. Experimental results show that our method achieves an mAP of 80.4%, with a parameter count of only 0.725 M, providing strong support for future tasks such as UAV field inspections.