Owing to the relatively small size of vehicles in remote sensing images, lacking sufficient detailed appearance to distinguish vehicles from similar objects, the detection performance is still far from satisfactory compared with the detection results on everyday images. Inspired by the positive effects of super-resolution convolutional neural network (SRCNN) for object detection and the stunning success of deep CNN techniques, we apply generative adversarial network frameworks to realize simultaneous SRCNN and vehicle detection in an end-to-end manner, and the detection loss is backpropagated into the SRCNN during training to facilitate detection. In particular, our work is unsupervised and bypasses the requirement of low-/high-resolution image pairs during the training stage, achieving increased generality and applicability. Extensive experiments on representative data sets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art detectors. (The source code will be made available after the review process.)

Deep learning has emerged as a powerful tool for semantic segmentation tasks. However, in some data-deficient and resource-limited scenarios, networks are constrained to learn novel concepts. To tackle this problem, few-shot segmentation (FSS) has been proposed by the machine learning community, aiming at segmenting novel objects by leveraging a handful of annotated samples. However, most advanced FSS algorithms suffer from severe performance degradation when directly applied to remote sensing image (RSI) domains. Challenges arise due to the unique characteristics of RSIs. To address the large intra-class variation brought by various imaging conditions and large-scale variations, a Query Adaptive Transformer (QAT) is proposed. QAT incorporates query priors into the feature extraction process, adapting RSI features to novel objects from query RSIs. It is noteworthy that query priors are extracted via a Query Prior Generation (QPG) module devoid of any query label information. To alleviate interference brought by complex object distribution, a multi-prototype strategy is adopted instead of representing objects with a single prototype ambiguously. Moreover, we rectify the prototypes using a Prior Injection Module (PIM), thereby fully leveraging the advantages offered by query priors. The superiority of our method is validated through comprehensive experiments on the public iSAID-5 ⁱ dataset and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods. Finally, we propose a novel cross-domain setting to investigate the potential and generalizability of few-shot RSI segmentation for several Earth observation applications.

Vehicle detection in remote sensing images has attracted remarkable attention for its important role in a variety of applications in traffic, security, and military fields. Motivated by the stunning success of region convolutional neural network (R-CNN) techniques, which have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in object detection task on benchmark data sets, we propose to improve the Faster R-CNN method with better feature extraction, multiscale feature fusion, and homography data augmentation to realize vehicle detection in remote sensing images. Extensive experiments on representative remote sensing data sets related to vehicle detection demonstrate that our method achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art approaches. The source code will be made available (after the review process).

Small data hold big artificial intelligence (AI) potential. As one of the promising small data AI approaches, few-shot learning has the goal to learn a model efficiently that can recognize novel classes with extremely limited training samples. Therefore, it is critical to accumulate useful prior knowledge obtained from large-scale base class dataset. To realize few-shot scene classification of optical remote sensing images, we start from a baseline model that trains all base classes using a standard cross-entropy loss leveraging two auxiliary objectives to capture intrinsical characteristics across the semantic classes. Specifically, rotation prediction learns to recognize the 2-D rotation of an input to guide the learning of class-transferable knowledge, and contrastive learning aims to pull together the positive pairs while pushing apart the negative pairs to promote intraclass consistency and interclass inconsistency. We jointly optimize two such pretext tasks and semantic class prediction task in an end-to-end manner. To further overcome the overfitting issue, we introduce a regularization technique, adversarial model perturbation, to calibrate the pretext tasks so as to enhance the generalization ability. Extensive experiments on public remote sensing benchmarks including Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU)-RESISC45, aerial image dataset (AID), and Wuhan University (WHU)-remote sensing (RS)-19 demonstrate that our method works effectively and achieves best performance that significantly outperforms many state-of-the-art approaches.

Vehicle detection from earth-observation (EO) image has been attracting remarkable attention for its critical value in a variety of applications. Encouraged by the stunning success of deep learning techniques based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have revolutionized the visual data processing community and obtained the state-of-the-art performance in a variety of classification and recognition tasks on benchmark datasets, we propose a network, called EOVNet (EO image-based vehicle detection network), to bridge the gap between the advanced deep learning research of object detection and the specific task of vehicle detection in EO images. Our network has integrated nearly all advanced techniques including very deep residual networks for feature extraction, feature pyramid to fuse multiscale features, network for proposal generation with feature sharing, and hard example mining. Moreover, our novel designs of probability-based localization and homography-based data augmentation have been investigated, resulting in further improvement of the detection performance. For performance evaluation, we have collected nearly all the representative EO datasets associated with vehicle detection. Extensive experiments on the representative datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art object detection approach Faster R-CNN++ (which is based on the Faster R-CNN framework, but with significant improvement) with 5% average precision improvement. The source code will be made available after the review process.