Understanding the temporal dynamics of Earth's surface is a mission of multi-temporal remote sensing image analysis, significantly promoted by deep vision models with its fuel -- labeled multi-temporal images. However, collecting, preprocessing, and annotating multi-temporal remote sensing images at scale is non-trivial since it is expensive and knowledge-intensive. In this paper, we present a scalable multi-temporal remote sensing change data generator via generative modeling, which is cheap and automatic, alleviating these problems. Our main idea is to simulate a stochastic change process over time. We consider the stochastic change process as a probabilistic semantic state transition, namely generative probabilistic change model (GPCM), which decouples the complex simulation problem into two more trackable sub-problems, \ie, change event simulation and semantic change synthesis. To solve these two problems, we present the change generator (Changen), a GAN-based GPCM, enabling controllable object change data generation, including customizable object property, and change event. The extensive experiments suggest that our Changen has superior generation capability, and the change detectors with Changen pre-training exhibit excellent transferability to real-world change datasets.

Large datasets, such as LAION-5B, contain a diverse distribution of images shared online. However, extraction of domain-specific subsets of large image corpora is challenging. The extraction approach based on an anchor dataset, combined with further filtering, is proposed here and demonstrated for the domain of satellite imagery. This results in the release of LAION-EO, a dataset sourced from the web containing pairs of text and satellite images in high (pixel-wise) resolution. The paper outlines the acquisition procedure as well as some of the features of the dataset.

We introduce a multi-sensor navigation system for autonomous surface vessels (ASV) intended for water-quality monitoring in freshwater lakes. Our mission planner uses satellite imagery as a prior map, formulating offline a mission-level policy for global navigation of the ASV and enabling autonomous online execution via local perception and local planning modules. A significant challenge is posed by the inconsistencies in traversability estimation between satellite images and real lakes, due to environmental effects such as wind, aquatic vegetation, shallow waters, and fluctuating water levels. Hence, we specifically modelled these traversability uncertainties as stochastic edges in a graph and optimized for a mission-level policy that minimizes the expected total travel distance. To execute the policy, we propose a modern local planner architecture that processes sensor inputs and plans paths to execute the high-level policy under uncertain traversability conditions. Our system was tested on three km-scale missions on a Northern Ontario lake, demonstrating that our GPS-, vision-, and sonar-enabled ASV system can effectively execute the mission-level policy and disambiguate the traversability of stochastic edges. Finally, we provide insights gained from practical field experience and offer several future directions to enhance the overall reliability of ASV navigation systems.

In remote sensing imagery analysis, patch-based methods have limitations in capturing information beyond the sliding window. This shortcoming poses a significant challenge in processing complex and variable geo-objects, which results in semantic inconsistency in segmentation results. To address this challenge, we propose a dynamic scale perception framework, named GeoAgent, which adaptively captures appropriate scale context information outside the image patch based on the different geo-objects. In GeoAgent, each image patch's states are represented by a global thumbnail and a location mask. The global thumbnail provides context beyond the patch, and the location mask guides the perceived spatial relationships. The scale-selection actions are performed through a Scale Control Agent (SCA). A feature indexing module is proposed to enhance the ability of the agent to distinguish the current image patch's location. The action switches the patch scale and context branch of a dual-branch segmentation network that extracts and fuses the features of multi-scale patches. The GeoAgent adjusts the network parameters to perform the appropriate scale-selection action based on the reward received for the selected scale. The experimental results, using two publicly available datasets and our newly constructed dataset WUSU, demonstrate that GeoAgent outperforms previous segmentation methods, particularly for large-scale mapping applications.

We present a locality-aware method for interpreting the latent space of wavelet-based Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), that can well capture the large spatial and spectral variability that is characteristic to satellite imagery. By focusing on preserving locality, the proposed method is able to decompose the weight-space of pre-trained GANs and recover interpretable directions that correspond to high-level semantic concepts (such as urbanization, structure density, flora presence) - that can subsequently be used for guided synthesis of satellite imagery. In contrast to typically used approaches that focus on capturing the variability of the weight-space in a reduced dimensionality space (i.e., based on Principal Component Analysis, PCA), we show that preserving locality leads to vectors with different angles, that are more robust to artifacts and can better preserve class information. Via a set of quantitative and qualitative examples, we further show that the proposed approach can outperform both baseline geometric augmentations, as well as global, PCA-based approaches for data synthesis in the context of data augmentation for satellite scene classification.

Air transport poses significant environmental challenges, particularly regarding the role of flight contrails in climate change due to their potential global warming impact. Traditional computer vision techniques struggle under varying remote sensing image conditions, and conventional machine learning approaches using convolutional neural networks are limited by the scarcity of hand-labeled contrail datasets. To address these issues, we employ few-shot transfer learning to introduce an innovative approach for accurate contrail segmentation with minimal labeled data. Our methodology leverages backbone segmentation models pre-trained on extensive image datasets and fine-tuned using an augmented contrail-specific dataset. We also introduce a novel loss function, termed SR Loss, which enhances contrail line detection by transforming the image space into Hough space. This transformation results in a significant performance improvement over generic image segmentation loss functions. Our approach offers a robust solution to the challenges posed by limited labeled data and significantly advances the state of contrail detection models.

Vision Transformer (ViT) models have recently emerged as powerful and versatile models for various visual tasks. Recently, a work called PMF has achieved promising results in few-shot image classification by utilizing pre-trained vision transformer models. However, PMF employs full fine-tuning for learning the downstream tasks, leading to significant overfitting and storage issues, especially in the remote sensing domain. In order to tackle these issues, we turn to the recently proposed parameter-efficient tuning methods, such as VPT, which updates only the newly added prompt parameters while keeping the pre-trained backbone frozen. Inspired by VPT, we propose the Meta Visual Prompt Tuning (MVP) method. Specifically, we integrate the VPT method into the meta-learning framework and tailor it to the remote sensing domain, resulting in an efficient framework for Few-Shot Remote Sensing Scene Classification (FS-RSSC). Furthermore, we introduce a novel data augmentation strategy based on patch embedding recombination to enhance the representation and diversity of scenes for classification purposes. Experiment results on the FS-RSSC benchmark demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed MVP over existing methods in various settings, such as various-way-various-shot, various-way-one-shot, and cross-domain adaptation.

Automatic road extraction from satellite imagery using deep learning is a viable alternative to traditional manual mapping. Therefore it has received considerable attention recently. However, most of the existing methods are supervised and require pixel-level labeling, which is tedious and error-prone. To make matters worse, the earth has a diverse range of terrain, vegetation, and man-made objects. It is well known that models trained in one area generalize poorly to other areas. Various shooting conditions such as light and angel, as well as different image processing techniques further complicate the issue. It is impractical to develop training data to cover all image styles. This paper proposes to leverage OpenStreetMap road data as weak labels and large scale satellite imagery to pre-train semantic segmentation models. Our extensive experimental results show that the prediction accuracy increases with the amount of the weakly labeled data, as well as the road density in the areas chosen for training. Using as much as 100 times more data than the widely used DeepGlobe road dataset, our model with the D-LinkNet architecture and the ResNet-50 backbone exceeds the top performer of the current DeepGlobe leaderboard. Furthermore, due to large-scale pre-training, our model generalizes much better than those trained with only the curated datasets, implying great application potential.

Semantic segmentation is crucial in remote sensing, where high-resolution satellite images are segmented into meaningful regions. Recent advancements in deep learning have significantly improved satellite image segmentation. However, most of these methods are typically trained in fully supervised settings that require high-quality pixel-level annotations, which are expensive and time-consuming to obtain. In this work, we present a weakly supervised learning algorithm to train semantic segmentation algorithms that only rely on query point annotations instead of full mask labels. Our proposed approach performs accurate semantic segmentation and improves efficiency by significantly reducing the cost and time required for manual annotation. Specifically, we generate superpixels and extend the query point labels into those superpixels that group similar meaningful semantics. Then, we train semantic segmentation models, supervised with images partially labeled with the superpixels pseudo-labels. We benchmark our weakly supervised training approach on an aerial image dataset and different semantic segmentation architectures, showing that we can reach competitive performance compared to fully supervised training while reducing the annotation effort.

Onboard intelligent processing is widely applied in emergency tasks in the field of remote sensing. However, it is predominantly confined to an individual platform with a limited observation range as well as susceptibility to interference, resulting in limited accuracy. Considering the current state of multi-platform collaborative observation, this article innovatively presents a distributed collaborative perception network called DCP-Net. Firstly, the proposed DCP-Net helps members to enhance perception performance by integrating features from other platforms. Secondly, a self-mutual information match module is proposed to identify collaboration opportunities and select suitable partners, prioritizing critical collaborative features and reducing redundant transmission cost. Thirdly, a related feature fusion module is designed to address the misalignment between local and collaborative features, improving the quality of fused features for the downstream task. We conduct extensive experiments and visualization analyses using three semantic segmentation datasets, including Potsdam, iSAID and DFC23. The results demonstrate that DCP-Net outperforms the existing methods comprehensively, improving mIoU by 2.61%~16.89% at the highest collaboration efficiency, which promotes the performance to a state-of-the-art level.