This paper reviews the second challenge on spectral reconstruction from RGB images, i.e., the recovery of whole- scene hyperspectral (HS) information from a 3-channel RGB image. As in the previous challenge, two tracks were provided: (i) a "Clean" track where HS images are estimated from noise-free RGBs, the RGB images are themselves calculated numerically using the ground-truth HS images and supplied spectral sensitivity functions (ii) a "Real World" track, simulating capture by an uncalibrated and unknown camera, where the HS images are recovered from noisy JPEG-compressed RGB images. A new, larger-than-ever, natural hyperspectral image data set is presented, containing a total of 510 HS images. The Clean and Real World tracks had 103 and 78 registered participants respectively, with 14 teams competing in the final testing phase. A description of the proposed methods, alongside their challenge scores and an extensive evaluation of top performing methods is also provided. They gauge the state-of-the-art in spectral reconstruction from an RGB image.

In this paper, we present an efficient framework to cognitively detect and track salient objects from videos. In general, colored visible image in red-green-blue (RGB) has better distinguishability in human visual perception, yet it suffers from the effect of illumination noise and shadows. On the contrary, the thermal image is less sensitive to these noise effects though its distinguishability varies according to environmental settings. To this end, cognitive fusion of these two modalities provides an effective solution to tackle this problem. First, a background model is extracted followed by a two-stage background subtraction for foreground detection in visible and thermal images. To deal with cases of occlusion or overlap, knowledge-based forward tracking and backward tracking are employed to identify separate objects even the foreground detection fails. To evaluate the proposed method, a publicly available color-thermal benchmark dataset Object Tracking and Classification in and Beyond the Visible Spectrum is employed here. For our foreground detection evaluation, objective and subjective analysis against several state-of-the-art methods have been done on our manually segmented ground truth. For our object tracking evaluation, comprehensive qualitative experiments have also been done on all video sequences. Promising results have shown that the proposed fusion-based approach can successfully detect and track multiple human objects in most scenes regardless of any light change or occlusion problem.

As a fundamental task in remote sensing observation of the earth, change detection using hyperspectral images (HSI) features high accuracy due to the combination of the rich spectral and spatial information, especially for identifying land-cover variations in bi-temporal HSIs. Relying on the image difference, existing HSI change detection methods fail to preserve the spectral characteristics and suffer from high data dimensionality, making them extremely challenging to deal with changing areas of various sizes. To tackle these challenges, we propose a cross-band 2-D self-attention Network (CBANet) for end-to-end HSI change detection. By embedding a cross-band feature extraction module into a 2-D spatial-spectral self-attention module, CBANet is highly capable of extracting the spectral difference of matching pixels by considering the correlation between adjacent pixels. The CBANet has shown three key advantages: 1) less parameters and high efficiency; 2) high efficacy of extracting representative spectral information from bi-temporal images; and 3) high stability and accuracy for identifying both sparse sporadic changing pixels and large changing areas whilst preserving the edges. Comprehensive experiments on three publicly available datasets have fully validated the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed methodology.