The availability of curated large-scale training data is a crucial factor for the development of well-generalizing deep learning methods for the extraction of geoinformation from multi-sensor remote sensing imagery. While quite some datasets have already been published by the community, most of them suffer from rather strong limitations, e.g. regarding spatial coverage, diversity or simply number of available samples. Exploiting the freely available data acquired by the Sentinel satellites of the Copernicus program implemented by the European Space Agency, as well as the cloud computing facilities of Google Earth Engine, we provide a dataset consisting of 180,662 triplets of dual-pol synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image patches, multi-spectral Sentinel-2 image patches, and MODIS land cover maps. With all patches being fully georeferenced at a 10 m ground sampling distance and covering all inhabited continents during all meteorological seasons, we expect the dataset to support the community in developing sophisticated deep learning-based approaches for common tasks such as scene classification or semantic segmentation for land cover mapping.
A challenging problem in deep learning-based machine listening field is the degradation of the performance when using data from unseen conditions. In this paper we focus on the acoustic scene classification (ASC) task and propose an adversarial deep learning method to allow adapting an acoustic scene classification system to deal with a new acoustic channel resulting from data captured with a different recording device. We build upon the theoretical model of H{\Delta}H-distance and previous adversarial discriminative deep learning method for ASC unsupervised domain adaptation, and we present an adversarial training based method using the Wasserstein distance. We improve the state-of-the-art mean accuracy on the data from the unseen conditions from 32% to 45%, using the TUT Acoustic Scenes dataset.
Compared with global average pooling in existing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), global covariance pooling can capture richer statistics of deep features, having potential for improving representation and generalization abilities of deep CNNs. However, integration of global covariance pooling into deep CNNs brings two challenges: (1) robust covariance estimation given deep features of high dimension and small sample size; (2) appropriate usage of geometry of covariances. To address these challenges, we propose a global Matrix Power Normalized COVariance (MPN-COV) Pooling. Our MPN-COV conforms to a robust covariance estimator, very suitable for scenario of high dimension and small sample size. It can also be regarded as Power-Euclidean metric between covariances, effectively exploiting their geometry. Furthermore, a global Gaussian embedding network is proposed to incorporate first-order statistics into MPN-COV. For fast training of MPN-COV networks, we implement an iterative matrix square root normalization, avoiding GPU unfriendly eigen-decomposition inherent in MPN-COV. Additionally, progressive 1x1 convolutions and group convolution are introduced to compress covariance representations. The proposed methods are highly modular, readily plugged into existing deep CNNs. Extensive experiments are conducted on large-scale object classification, scene categorization, fine-grained visual recognition and texture classification, showing our methods outperform the counterparts and obtain state-of-the-art performance.
In this paper, we propose a new strategy for acoustic scene classification (ASC) , namely recognizing acoustic scenes through identifying distinct sound events. This differs from existing strategies, which focus on characterizing global acoustical distributions of audio or the temporal evolution of short-term audio features, without analysis down to the level of sound events. To identify distinct sound events for each scene, we formulate ASC in a multi-instance learning (MIL) framework, where each audio recording is mapped into a bag-of-instances representation. Here, instances can be seen as high-level representations for sound events inside a scene. We also propose a MIL neural networks model, which implicitly identifies distinct instances (i.e., sound events). Furthermore, we propose two specially designed modules that model the multi-temporal scale and multi-modal natures of the sound events respectively. The experiments were conducted on the official development set of the DCASE2018 Task1 Subtask B, and our best-performing model improves over the official baseline by 9.4% (68.3% vs 58.9%) in terms of classification accuracy. This study indicates that recognizing acoustic scenes by identifying distinct sound events is effective and paves the way for future studies that combine this strategy with previous ones.
Several popular approaches to 3D vision tasks process multiple views of the input independently with deep neural networks pre-trained on natural images, achieving view permutation invariance through a single round of pooling over all views. We argue that this operation discards important information and leads to subpar global descriptors. In this paper, we propose a group convolutional approach to multiple view aggregation where convolutions are performed over a discrete subgroup of the rotation group, enabling, thus, joint reasoning over all views in an equivariant (instead of invariant) fashion, up to the very last layer. We further develop this idea to operate on smaller discrete homogeneous spaces of the rotation group, where a polar view representation is used to maintain equivariance with only a fraction of the number of input views. We set the new state of the art in several large scale 3D shape retrieval tasks, and show additional applications to panoramic scene classification.
Recently, data-driven deep saliency models have achieved high performance and have outperformed classical saliency models, as demonstrated by results on datasets such as the MIT300 and SALICON. Yet, there remains a large gap between the performance of these models and the inter-human baseline. Some outstanding questions include what have these models learned, how and where they fail, and how they can be improved. This article attempts to answer these questions by analyzing the representations learned by individual neurons located at the intermediate layers of deep saliency models. To this end, we follow the steps of existing deep saliency models, that is borrowing a pre-trained model of object recognition to encode the visual features and learning a decoder to infer the saliency. We consider two cases when the encoder is used as a fixed feature extractor and when it is fine-tuned, and compare the inner representations of the network. To study how the learned representations depend on the task, we fine-tune the same network using the same image set but for two different tasks: saliency prediction versus scene classification. Our analyses reveal that: 1) some visual regions (e.g. head, text, symbol, vehicle) are already encoded within various layers of the network pre-trained for object recognition, 2) using modern datasets, we find that fine-tuning pre-trained models for saliency prediction makes them favor some categories (e.g. head) over some others (e.g. text), 3) although deep models of saliency outperform classical models on natural images, the converse is true for synthetic stimuli (e.g. pop-out search arrays), an evidence of significant difference between human and data-driven saliency models, and 4) we confirm that, after-fine tuning, the change in inner-representations is mostly due to the task and not the domain shift in the data.
Cloud-based overlays are often present in optical remote sensing images, thus limiting the application of acquired data. Removing clouds is an indispensable pre-processing step in remote sensing image analysis. Deep learning has achieved great success in the field of remote sensing in recent years, including scene classification and change detection. However, deep learning is rarely applied in remote sensing image removal clouds. The reason is the lack of data sets for training neural networks. In order to solve this problem, this paper first proposed the Remote sensing Image Cloud rEmoving dataset (RICE). The proposed dataset consists of two parts: RICE1 contains 500 pairs of images, each pair has images with cloud and cloudless size of 512*512; RICE2 contains 450 sets of images, each set contains three 512*512 size images. , respectively, the reference picture without clouds, the picture of the cloud and the mask of its cloud. The dataset is freely available at \url{https://github.com/BUPTLdy/RICE_DATASET}.
We investigate supervised learning strategies that improve the training of neural network audio classifiers on small annotated collections. In particular, we study whether (i) a naive regularization of the solution space, (ii) prototypical networks, (iii) transfer learning, or (iv) their combination, can foster deep learning models to better leverage a small amount of training examples. To this end, we evaluate (i-iv) for the tasks of acoustic event recognition and acoustic scene classification, considering from 1 to 100 labeled examples per class. Results indicate that transfer learning is a powerful strategy in such scenarios, but prototypical networks show promising results when one does not count with external or validation data.
A general problem in acoustic scene classification task is the mismatched conditions between training and testing data, which significantly reduces the performance of the developed methods on classification accuracy. As a countermeasure, we present the first method of unsupervised adversarial domain adaptation for acoustic scene classification. We employ a model pre-trained on data from one set of conditions and by using data from other set of conditions, we adapt the model in order that its output cannot be used for classifying the set of conditions that input data belong to. We use a freely available dataset from the DCASE 2018 challenge Task 1, subtask B, that contains data from mismatched recording devices. We consider the scenario where the annotations are available for the data recorded from one device, but not for the rest. Our results show that with our model agnostic method we can achieve $\sim 10\%$ increase at the accuracy on an unseen and unlabeled dataset, while keeping almost the same performance on the labeled dataset.
Registering images from different modalities is an active area of research in computer aided medical interventions. Several registration algorithms have been developed, many of which achieve high accuracy. However, these results are dependent on many factors, including the quality of the extracted features or segmentations being registered as well as the initial alignment. Although several methods have been developed towards improving segmentation algorithms and automating the segmentation process, few automatic initialization algorithms have been explored. In many cases, the initial alignment from which a registration is initiated is performed manually, which interferes with the clinical workflow. Our aim is to use scene classification in endoscopic procedures to achieve coarse alignment of the endoscope and a preoperative image of the anatomy. In this paper, we show using simulated scenes that a neural network can predict the region of anatomy (with respect to a preoperative image) that the endoscope is located in by observing a single endoscopic video frame. With limited training and without any hyperparameter tuning, our method achieves an accuracy of 76.53 (+/-1.19)%. There are several avenues for improvement, making this a promising direction of research. Code is available at https://github.com/AyushiSinha/AutoInitialization.
We present an analysis of three possible strategies for exploiting the power of existing convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) in different scenarios from the ones they were trained: full training, fine tuning, and using ConvNets as feature extractors. In many applications, especially including remote sensing, it is not feasible to fully design and train a new ConvNet, as this usually requires a considerable amount of labeled data and demands high computational costs. Therefore, it is important to understand how to obtain the best profit from existing ConvNets. We perform experiments with six popular ConvNets using three remote sensing datasets. We also compare ConvNets in each strategy with existing descriptors and with state-of-the-art baselines. Results point that fine tuning tends to be the best performing strategy. In fact, using the features from the fine-tuned ConvNet with linear SVM obtains the best results. We also achieved state-of-the-art results for the three datasets used.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have made remarkable progress on scene recognition, partially due to these recent large-scale scene datasets, such as the Places and Places2. Scene categories are often defined by multi-level information, including local objects, global layout, and background environment, thus leading to large intra-class variations. In addition, with the increasing number of scene categories, label ambiguity has become another crucial issue in large-scale classification. This paper focuses on large-scale scene recognition and makes two major contributions to tackle these issues. First, we propose a multi-resolution CNN architecture that captures visual content and structure at multiple levels. The multi-resolution CNNs are composed of coarse resolution CNNs and fine resolution CNNs, which are complementary to each other. Second, we design two knowledge guided disambiguation techniques to deal with the problem of label ambiguity. (i) We exploit the knowledge from the confusion matrix computed on validation data to merge ambiguous classes into a super category. (ii) We utilize the knowledge of extra networks to produce a soft label for each image. Then the super categories or soft labels are employed to guide CNN training on the Places2. We conduct extensive experiments on three large-scale image datasets (ImageNet, Places, and Places2), demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, our method takes part in two major scene recognition challenges, and achieves the second place at the Places2 challenge in ILSVRC 2015, and the first place at the LSUN challenge in CVPR 2016. Finally, we directly test the learned representations on other scene benchmarks, and obtain the new state-of-the-art results on the MIT Indoor67 (86.7\%) and SUN397 (72.0\%). We release the code and models at~\url{https://github.com/wanglimin/MRCNN-Scene-Recognition}.
Inspired by recent development of artificial satellite, remote sensing images have attracted extensive attention. Recently, noticeable progress has been made in scene classification and target detection.However, it is still not clear how to describe the remote sensing image content with accurate and concise sentences. In this paper, we investigate to describe the remote sensing images with accurate and flexible sentences. First, some annotated instructions are presented to better describe the remote sensing images considering the special characteristics of remote sensing images. Second, in order to exhaustively exploit the contents of remote sensing images, a large-scale aerial image data set is constructed for remote sensing image caption. Finally, a comprehensive review is presented on the proposed data set to fully advance the task of remote sensing caption. Extensive experiments on the proposed data set demonstrate that the content of the remote sensing image can be completely described by generating language descriptions. The data set is available at https://github.com/201528014227051/RSICD_optimal
In recent years, the widespread use of deep neural networks (DNNs) has facilitated great improvements in performance for computer vision tasks like image classification and object recognition. In most realistic computer vision applications, an input image undergoes some form of image distortion such as blur and additive noise during image acquisition or transmission. Deep networks trained on pristine images perform poorly when tested on such distortions. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of image distortions like Gaussian blur and additive noise on the activations of pre-trained convolutional filters. We propose a metric to identify the most noise susceptible convolutional filters and rank them in order of the highest gain in classification accuracy upon correction. In our proposed approach called DeepCorrect, we apply small stacks of convolutional layers with residual connections, at the output of these ranked filters and train them to correct the worst distortion affected filter activations, whilst leaving the rest of the pre-trained filter outputs in the network unchanged. Performance results show that applying DeepCorrect models for common vision tasks like image classification (ImageNet), object recognition (Caltech-101, Caltech-256) and scene classification (SUN-397), significantly improves the robustness of DNNs against distorted images and outperforms other alternative approaches..
The effectiveness of Convolutional Neural Networks stems in large part from their ability to exploit the translation invariance that is inherent in many learning problems. Recently, it was shown that CNNs can exploit other invariances, such as rotation invariance, by using group convolutions instead of planar convolutions. However, for reasons of performance and ease of implementation, it has been necessary to limit the group convolution to transformations that can be applied to the filters without interpolation. Thus, for images with square pixels, only integer translations, rotations by multiples of 90 degrees, and reflections are admissible. Whereas the square tiling provides a 4-fold rotational symmetry, a hexagonal tiling of the plane has a 6-fold rotational symmetry. In this paper we show how one can efficiently implement planar convolution and group convolution over hexagonal lattices, by re-using existing highly optimized convolution routines. We find that, due to the reduced anisotropy of hexagonal filters, planar HexaConv provides better accuracy than planar convolution with square filters, given a fixed parameter budget. Furthermore, we find that the increased degree of symmetry of the hexagonal grid increases the effectiveness of group convolutions, by allowing for more parameter sharing. We show that our method significantly outperforms conventional CNNs on the AID aerial scene classification dataset, even outperforming ImageNet pre-trained models.