Road damage detection is essential to the maintenance and management of roads. The morphological road damage contains a large number of multi-scale features, which means that existing road damage detection algorithms are unable to effectively distinguish and fuse multiple features. In this paper, we propose a dense multiscale feature learning Transformer embedding cross-shaped attention for road damage detection (DMTC) network, which can segment the damage information in road images and improve the effectiveness of road damage detection. Our DMTC makes three contributions. Firstly, we adopt a cross-shaped attention mechanism to expand the perceptual field of feature extraction, and its global attention effectively improves the feature description of the network. Secondly, we use the dense multi-scale feature learning module to integrate local information at different scales, so that we are able to overcome the difficulty of detecting multiscale targets. Finally, we utilize a multi-layer convolutional segmentation head to generalize the previous feature learning and get a final detection result. Experimental results show that our DMTC network could segment pavement pothole patterns more accurately and effectively than other methods, achieving an F1 score of 79.39% as well as an OA score of 99.83% on the cracks-and-potholes-in-road-images-dataset (CPRID).

Fusing infrared and visible images taken by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a challenging task, since infrared images distinguish the target from the background by the difference in infrared radiation, while the low resolution also produces a less pronounced effect. Conversely, the visible light spectrum has a high spatial resolution and rich texture; however, it is easily affected by harsh weather conditions like low light. Therefore, the fusion of infrared and visible light has the potential to provide complementary advantages. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale dense feature-aware network via integrated attention for infrared and visible image fusion, namely DFA-Net. Firstly, we construct a dual-channel encoder to extract the deep features of infrared and visible images. Secondly, we adopt a nested decoder to adequately integrate the features of various scales of the encoder so as to realize the multi-scale feature representation of visible image detail texture and infrared image salient target. Then, we present a feature-aware network via integrated attention to further fuse the feature information of different scales, which can focus on specific advantage features of infrared and visible images. Finally, we use unsupervised gradient estimation and intensity loss to learn significant fusion features of infrared and visible images. In addition, our proposed DFA-Net approach addresses the challenges of fusing infrared and visible images captured by a UAV. The results show that DFA-Net achieved excellent image fusion performance in nine quantitative evaluation indexes under a low-light environment.

Road crack detection is one of the important issues in the field of traffic safety and urban planning. Currently, road damage varies in type and scale, and often has different sizes and depths, making the detection task more challenging. To address this problem, we propose a Cross-Attention-guided Feature Alignment Network (CAFANet) for extracting and integrating multi-scale features of road damage. Firstly, we use a dual-branch visual encoder model with the same structure but different patch sizes (one large patch and one small patch) to extract multi-level damage features. We utilize a Cross-Layer Interaction (CLI) module to establish interaction between the corresponding layers of the two branches, combining their unique feature extraction capability and contextual understanding. Secondly, we employ a Feature Alignment Block (FAB) to align the features from different levels or branches in terms of semantics and spatial aspects, which significantly improves the CAFANet’s perception of the damage regions, reduces background interference, and achieves more precise detection and segmentation of damage. Finally, we adopt multi-layer convolutional segmentation heads to obtain high-resolution feature maps. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct experiments on the public CRACK500 dataset and compare it with other mainstream methods. Experimental results demonstrate that CAFANet achieves excellent performance in road crack detection tasks, which exhibits significant improvements in terms of F1 score and accuracy, with an F1 score of 73.22% and an accuracy of 96.78%.

Building change detection (BCD) is crucial for urban construction and planning. The powerful discriminative ability of deep convolutions in deep learning-based BCD methods has considerably increased the accuracy and efficiency. However, dense and continuously distributed buildings contain a wide range of multi-scale features, which render current deep learning methods incapable of discriminating and incorporating multiple features effectively. In this work, we propose a Siamese cross-attention discrimination network (SCADNet) to identify complex information in bitemporal images and improve the change detection accuracy. Specifically, we first use the Siamese cross-attention (SCA) module to learn unchanged and changed feature information, combining multi-head cross-attention to improve the global validity of high-level semantic information. Second, we adapt a multi-scale feature fusion (MFF) module to integrate embedded tokens with context-rich channel transformer outputs. Then, upsampling is performed to fuse the extracted multi-scale information content to recover the original image information to the maximum extent. For information content with a large difference in contextual semantics, we perform filtering using a differential context discrimination (DCD) module, which can help the network to avoid pseudo-change occurrences. The experimental results show that the present SCADNet is able to achieve a significant change detection performance in terms of three public BCD datasets (LEVIR-CD, SYSU-CD, and WHU-CD). For these three datasets, we obtain F1 scores of 90.32%, 81.79%, and 88.62%, as well as OA values of 97.98%, 91.23%, and 98.88%, respectively.

Accurate and intelligent building change detection greatly contributes to effective urban development, optimized resource management, and informed decision-making in domains such as urban planning, land management, and environmental monitoring. Existing methodologies face challenges in effectively integrating local and global features for accurate building change detection. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method that uses focal self-attention to process the feature vector of input images, which uses a “focusing” mechanism to guide the calculation of the self-attention mechanism. By focusing more on critical areas when processing image features in different regions, focal self-attention can better handle both local and global information, and is more flexible and adaptive than other methods, improving detection accuracy. In addition, our multi-level feature fusion module groups the features and then constructs a hierarchical residual structure to fuse the grouped features. On the LEVIR-CD and WHU-CD datasets, our proposed method achieved F1-scores of 91.62% and 89.45%, respectively. Compared with existing methods, ours performed better on building change detection tasks. Our method therefore provides a framework for solving problems related to building change detection, with some reference value and guiding significance.