High Resolution Remote Sensing Images Research Articles

Revolutionizing building damage detection: A novel weakly supervised approach using high-resolution remote sensing images

ABSTRACT Rapidly estimating post-disaster building damage via high-resolution remote sensing (HRRS) imagery is essential for initial disaster relief. However, the complex appearance of building damage poses challenges for existing methods. Specifically, relying solely on post-disaster images lacks building boundary guidance, while change detection methods using dual-temporal imageries are prone to introducing false changes. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel weakly supervised approach that leverages pre- and post-disaster HRRS images for building damage detection. The contributions of this paper are twofold. Firstly, a unique framework is proposed to utilize dual-temporal images. Precisely, the proposed method initially extracts fine-grained sub-building-level individuals from pre-disaster images by combining a fully convolutional neural network (FCN)-based method with superpixel segmentation. Then, these details serve as cues to effectively guide the detection of damaged building areas on post-disaster images, thereby enhancing accuracy. Secondly, we propose a weakly supervised method that solely relies on labeling building damage based on image patches but can ultimately yield pixel-level building damage results. Experiments conducted using HRRS images captured during the 2010 Haiti earthquake demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing methodologies. This effort of this paper will contribute to the sustainable development of cities and human settlements.

Usage of Airborne LiDAR Data and High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images in Implementing the Smart City Concept

The cities of the future should not only be smart, but also smart green, for the well-being of their inhabitants, the biodiversity of their ecosystems and for greater resilience to climate change. In a smart green city, the location of urban green spaces should be based on an analysis of the ecosystem services they provide. Therefore, it is necessary to develop appropriate information technology tools that process data from different sources to support the decision-making process by analysing ecosystem services. This article presents the methodology used to develop an urban green space planning tool, including its main challenges and solutions. Based on the integration of data from ALS, CLMS, topographic data, and orthoimagery, an urban green cover model and a 3D tree model were generated to complement a smart-city model with comprehensive statistics. The applied computational algorithms allow for reports on canopy volume, CO2 reduction, air pollutants, the effect of greenery on average temperature, interception, precipitation absorption, and changes in biomass. Furthermore, the tool can be used to analyse potential opportunities to modify the location of urban green spaces and their impact on ecosystem services. It can also assist urban planners in their decision-making process.

Multi-scale attention fusion network for semantic segmentation of remote sensing images

ABSTRACT In the realm of high-resolution remote sensing image (HRSI) segmentation, convolutional neural networks have shown their effectiveness and superiority. However, there are still two problems in the segmentation model that generally adopts the encoder-decoder structure in the face of HRSI: 1) Fusing high-level feature maps and low-level feature maps directly in the decoder will make spatial detail features easy to mask; 2) Although self-attention has been used to capture the long-distance dependence of features, the consumption of computing power and memory makes it have many restrictions in practical applications. Aiming at these two problems, this paper proposes a new HRSI segmentation model (named MLWNet). First, the introduction of the maximum pooling module improves the quality of the feature map and obtains the receptive field of the whole map and rich global semantic information. Then, based on a new linear complexity self-attention mechanism, we design a multi-scale linear self-attention module to abstract the correlation between contexts. Finally, the weighted feature fusion helps the feature map restore spatial details and refine the segmentation results. On the two HRSI datasets of ISPRS Potsdam and ISPRS Vaihingen, MLWNet achieved mIOU segmentation accuracy of 78.19% and 71.61%, respectively, which not only outperforms other mainstream segmentation models but also has only 17.423 M parameters. The segmentation model in this study has high precision and small parameters, which can provide decision information for real-time use of remote sensing images.

CLANET: a cross-linear attention network for semantic segmentation of urban scenes remote sensing images

ABSTRACT Semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing images is important in land cover classification, road extraction, building extraction, water extraction, etc. However, high-resolution remote-sensing images have a lot of details. Due to the fixed receptive field of convolution blocks, it is impossible to model the correlation of global features. In addition, complex fusion methods cannot integrate spatial and global context information. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a cross-linear attention network (CLANet) to capture spatial and context information in images. The structure consists of a spatial branch and a context branch. The spatial branch is constructed by stacked convolution to better capture spatial information. The context branch models the global information based on the transformer deformation module. In addition, to effectively fuse spatial and context information, this paper also designs a feature fusion module (FFM), which uses a cross-linear attention mechanism for feature aggregation. Finally, this paper conducts many experiments on the ISPRS Vaihingen and the ISPRS Potsdam datasets. Among them, 82.28% of mIoU achieves on the ISPRS Vaihingen dataset. The experimental results show that CLANet has better performance and effect than the methods in recent years.

A Novel Hybrid Method for Urban Green Space Segmentation from High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

A Novel Hybrid Method for Urban Green Space Segmentation from High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Multilevel Regularization Method for Building Outlines Extracted from High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Extraction of vectorized building outlines from high-resolution remote sensing images is highly useful for various application fields, such as map creation and urban planning. However, this process is often complicated by external factors, such as trees and shadows, which cause issues, such as excessive node redundancy, jagged lines, and unclear corner points. In this study, a multilevel regularization method was designed for building outlines, including the “overall–local–detail” levels. First, overall regularization was performed by combining the minimum bounding rectangle of the building outline with the Hausdorff distance method. Next, based on the convex hull of the building outline and the distribution characteristics of nodes along the outline, the building outline was divided into multiple line chains and classified for local regularization. Finally, the details of the building outline were processed, with the parallel and perpendicular characteristics enhanced to obtain the final regularization results. The experimental results showed that the proposed method effectively enhances the edge representation accuracy of building outlines and significantly improves the accuracy and regularity of building edges. Furthermore, it strengthens the orthogonal characteristics of building outlines, providing more accurate representations of true building outlines.

Semantic Segmentation of High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images with Improved U-Net Based on Transfer Learning

Semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing images has emerged as one of the foci of research in the remote sensing field, which can accurately identify objects on the ground and determine their localization. In contrast, the traditional deep learning-based semantic segmentation, on the other hand, requires a large amount of annotated data, which is unsuitable for high-resolution remote sensing tasks with limited resources. It is therefore important to build a semantic segmentation method for high-resolution remote sensing images. In this paper, it is proposed an improved U-Net model based on transfer learning to solve the semantic segmentation problem of high-resolution remote sensing images. The model is based on the symmetric encoder–decoder structure of U-Net. For the encoder, transfer learning is applied and VGG16 is used as the backbone of the feature extraction network, and in the decoder, after upsampling using bilinear interpolation, it is performed multiscale fusion with the feature maps of the corresponding layers of the encoder in turn and is finally obtained the predicted value of each pixel to achieve precise localization. To verify the efficacy of the proposed network, experiments are performed on the ISPRS Vaihingen dataset. The experiments show that the applied method has achieved high-quality semantic segmentation results on the high-resolution remote sensing dataset, and the MIoU is 1.70%, 2.20%, and 2.33% higher on the training, validation, and test sets, respectively, and the IoU is 4.26%, 6.89%, and 5.44% higher for the automotive category compared to the traditional U-Net.

CA-YOLOX: Deep Learning-Guided Road Intersection Location From High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

The location of road intersection from high resolution remote sensing (HRRS) images can be automatically obtained by deep learning. This has become one of the current data sources in urban smart transportation. However, limited by the small size, diverse types, complex distribution, and missing sample labels of road intersections in actual scenarios, it is difficult to accurately represent key features of road intersection by deep neural network (DNN) model. A new coordinate attention (CA) module-YOLOX (CA-YOLOX) method for accurately locating road intersections from HRRS images is presented. First, the spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) module is introduced into the backbone convolution network between the Darknet-53’ last feature layer and feature pyramid networks (FPN) structure. Second, the CA module is embedded into the feature fusion structure in FPN to focus more on the spatial shape distribution and texture features of road intersections. Third, we use focal loss to replace the traditional binary cross entropy (BCE) loss in the confidence loss to improve the iteration speed of the CA-YOLOX network. Finally, an extensive empirical experiment on Potsdam, IKONOS datasets, and ablation study is then implemented and tested. The results show that the presented CA-YOLOX method can promote the location accuracy of road intersection from HRRS images compared to the traditional You only look once (YOLO) model.

Global superpixel-merging via set maximum coverage

Due to better boundary adherence and low computational cost, the superpixel segmentation algorithm SLIC (simple linear iterative clustering) has been widely applied in vision-based applications. However, limit to unavoidable over-segmentation problem, one has to consider region-merging to reconstruct entire objects from the segmented superpixels (or called regions). The existing region-merging methods are generated from data clustering, and avoidably suffer from error-merging, slow convergence speed, or easily dropping in LOCAL optimal problems, especially for high-resolution RS (remote sensing) images. In this paper, instead of data clustering, we propose a fast GLOBAL method based on Set Maximum Coverage, termed as MaxCov-merging. Theoretically, the existence of the maximum coverage is proved by using Bayes optimal decision principle. To speed up MaxCov-merging, some heuristic strategies are also provided. Finally, extensive verification and comparison are carried on the public and our collected high-resolution images. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, the comparison shows the superiority of our MaxCov in terms of the performance of globality, ease of use and fast region-merging speed.

In-Terrestrial Aquaculture Fields Mapping from High Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Convolution neural networks are widely used for image processing in remote sensing. Aquacultures have an important role in food security and hence should be monitored. In this paper, a novel lightweight neural network for in-terrestrial aquaculture field retrieval from high-resolution remote sensing images is proposed. The structure of this pond segmentation network is based on the UNet architecture, providing higher training speed. Experiments are performed on Gaofen satellite datasets in Shanghai, China. The proposed network detects the inland aquaculture ponds in a shorter time than stateof-the-art neural network-based models and reaches an overall accuracy of about 90 %.

Detection and Classification of Buildings by Height from Single Urban High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Recent improvements in remote sensing technologies have boosted building detection techniques from rough classifications using moderate resolution imagery to precise extraction from high-resolution imagery. Shadows frequently emerge in high-resolution urban images. To exploit shadow information, we developed a novel building detection and classification algorithm for images of urban areas with large-size shadows, employing only the visible spectral bands to determine the height levels of buildings. The proposed method, building general-classified by height (BGCH), calculates shadow orientation, detects buildings using seed-blocks, and classifies the buildings into different height groups. Our proposed approach was tested on complex urban scenes from Toronto and Beijing. The experimental results illustrate that our proposed method accurately and efficiently detects and classifies buildings by their height levels; the building detection rate exceeded 95%. The precision of classification by height levels was over 90%. This novel building-height-level detection method provides rich information at low cost and is suitable for further city scene analysis, flood disaster risk assessment, population estimation, and building change detection applications.

GLF-Net: A Semantic Segmentation Model Fusing Global and Local Features for High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing images holds paramount importance in the field of remote sensing. To better excavate and fully fuse the features in high-resolution remote sensing images, this paper introduces a novel Global and Local Feature Fusion Network, abbreviated as GLF-Net, by incorporating the extensive contextual information and refined fine-grained features. The proposed GLF-Net, devised as an encoder–decoder network, employs the powerful ResNet50 as its baseline model. It incorporates two pivotal components within the encoder phase: a Covariance Attention Module (CAM) and a Local Fine-Grained Extraction Module (LFM). And an additional wavelet self-attention module (WST) is integrated into the decoder stage. The CAM effectively extracts the features of different scales from various stages of the ResNet and then encodes them with graph convolutions. In this way, the proposed GLF-Net model can well capture the global contextual information with both universality and consistency. Additionally, the local feature extraction module refines the feature map by encoding the semantic and spatial information, thereby capturing the local fine-grained features in images. Furthermore, the WST maximizes the synergy between the high-frequency and the low-frequency information, facilitating the fusion of global and local features for better performance in semantic segmentation. The effectiveness of the proposed GLF-Net model is validated through experiments conducted on the ISPRS Potsdam and Vaihingen datasets. The results verify that it can greatly improve segmentation accuracy.

Impact of Deep Convolutional Neural Network Structure on Photovoltaic Array Extraction from High Spatial Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Accurate information on the location, shape, and size of photovoltaic (PV) arrays is essential for optimal power system planning and energy system development. In this study, we explore the potential of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) for extracting PV arrays from high spatial resolution remote sensing (HSRRS) images. While previous research has mainly focused on the application of DCNNs, little attention has been paid to investigating the influence of different DCNN structures on the accuracy of PV array extraction. To address this gap, we compare the performance of seven popular DCNNs—AlexNet, VGG16, ResNet50, ResNeXt50, Xception, DenseNet121, and EfficientNetB6—based on a PV array dataset containing 2072 images of 1024 × 1024 size. We evaluate their intersection over union (IoU) values and highlight four DCNNs (EfficientNetB6, Xception, ResNeXt50, and VGG16) that consistently achieve IoU values above 94%. Furthermore, through analyzing the difference in the structure and features of these four DCNNs, we identify structural factors that contribute to the extraction of low-level spatial features (LFs) and high-level semantic features (HFs) of PV arrays. We find that the first feature extraction block without downsampling enhances the LFs’ extraction capability of the DCNNs, resulting in an increase in IoU values of approximately 0.25%. In addition, the use of separable convolution and attention mechanisms plays a crucial role in improving the HFs’ extraction, resulting in a 0.7% and 0.4% increase in IoU values, respectively. Overall, our study provides valuable insights into the impact of DCNN structures on the extraction of PV arrays from HSRRS images. These findings have significant implications for the selection of appropriate DCNNs and the design of robust DCNNs tailored for the accurate and efficient extraction of PV arrays.

SCA-Net: Multiscale Contextual Information Network for Building Extraction Based on High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Accurately extracting buildings is essential for urbanization rate statistics, urban planning, resource allocation, etc. The high-resolution remote sensing images contain rich building information, which provides an important data source for building extraction. However, the extreme abundance of building types with large differences in size, as well as the extreme complexity of the background environment, result in the accurate extraction of spatial details of multi-scale buildings, which remains a difficult problem worth studying. To this end, this study selects the representative Xinjiang Tumxuk urban area as the study area. A building extraction network (SCA-Net) with feature highlighting, multi-scale sensing, and multi-level feature fusion is proposed, which includes Selective kernel spatial Feature Extraction (SFE), Contextual Information Aggregation (CIA), and Attentional Feature Fusion (AFF) modules. First, Selective kernel spatial Feature Extraction modules are used for cascading composition, highlighting information representation of features, and improving the feature extraction capability. Adding a Contextual Information Aggregation module enables the acquisition of multi-scale contextual information. The Attentional Feature Fusion module bridges the semantic gap between high-level and low-level features to achieve effective fusion between cross-level features. The classical U-Net, Segnet, Deeplab v3+, and HRNet v2 semantic segmentation models are compared on the self-built Tmsk and WHU building datasets. The experimental results show that the algorithm proposed in this paper can effectively extract multi-scale buildings in complex backgrounds with IoUs of 85.98% and 89.90% on the two datasets, respectively. SCA-Net is a suitable method for building extraction from high-resolution remote sensing images with good usability and generalization.

Object-oriented building extraction based on visual attention mechanism.

Buildings, which play an important role in the daily lives of humans, are a significant indicator of urban development. Currently, automatic building extraction from high-resolution remote sensing images (RSI) has become an important means in urban studies, such as urban sprawl, urban planning, urban heat island effect, population estimation and damage evaluation. In this article, we propose a building extraction method that combines bottom-up RSI low-level feature extraction with top-down guidance from prior knowledge. In high-resolution RSI, buildings usually have high intensity, strong edges and clear textures. To generate primary features, we propose a feature space transform method that consider building. We propose an object oriented method for high-resolution RSI shadow extraction. Our method achieves user accuracy and producer accuracy above 95% for the extraction results of the experimental images. The overall accuracy is above 97%, and the quantity error is below 1%. Compared with the traditional method, our method has better performance on all the indicators, and the experiments prove the effectiveness of the method.

Square ancient sites detection in typical regions of the Mongolian plateau using improved faster R-CNN from Google Earth high-resolution images

ABSTRACT Many square ancient sites exist in the Mongolian plateau region, and locating them is of great importance for archaeological research. In recent years, object detection in Google Earth (GE) high-resolution remote sensing (RS) images based on deep learning has driven archaeologists’ research of ancient site detection. Deep learning techniques significantly improve the accuracy of site detection in RS images when compared with traditional detection methods while reducing design and computation time. Based on the characteristics of the research objectives, this paper proposes an improved Faster R-CNN algorithm for the detection of square ancient sites in GE high-resolution RS images, which employs Swin-Transformer, VGG16, Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP), Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks (SENet) to form an improved backbone network, and three methods to optimize the Region Proposal Network (RPN). In addition, a dataset of known square ancient sites containing four typical regions of the Mongolian plateau is built using GE high-resolution RS images for training and evaluating the algorithm model. The experimental results show that the Precision, Recall, F1, IoU, and Average Precision (AP) of the proposed improved Faster R-CNN are 91.38%, 91.16%, 91.27%, 83.49%, and 93.57%, respectively, which are 34.89%, 2.70%, 22.29%, 31.46%, and 7.32% higher than those of the original Faster R-CNN. The algorithm also has high evaluation metrics for object detection in four typical regions: hills, Gobi, cropland, and grassland. Finally, the proposed algorithm is applied to detect square ancient sites in six selected typical regions, and numerous new ones are discovered. Overall, the proposed algorithm provides an effective method for archaeological investigations in the study region.

MwdpNet: towards improving the recognition accuracy of tiny targets in high-resolution remote sensing image

This study aims to develop a deep learning model to improve the accuracy of identifying tiny targets on high resolution remote sensing (HRS) images. We propose a novel multi-level weighted depth perception network, which we refer to as MwdpNet, to better capture feature information of tiny targets in HRS images. In our method, we introduce a new group residual structure, S-Darknet53, as the backbone network of our proposed MwdpNet, and propose a multi-level feature weighted fusion strategy that fully utilizes shallow feature information to improve detection performance, particularly for tiny targets. To fully describe the high-level semantic information of the image, achieving better classification performance, we design a depth perception module (DPModule). Following this step, the channel attention guidance module (CAGM) is proposed to obtain attention feature maps for each scale, enhancing the recall rate of tiny targets and generating candidate regions more efficiently. Finally, we create four datasets of tiny targets and conduct comparative experiments on them. The results demonstrate that the mean Average Precision (mAP) of our proposed MwdpNet on the four datasets achieve 87.0%, 89.2%, 78.3%, and 76.0%, respectively, outperforming nine mainstream object detection algorithms. Our proposed approach provides an effective means and strategy for detecting tiny targets on HRS images.

On-Board Multi-Class Geospatial Object Detection Based on Convolutional Neural Network for High Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Multi-class geospatial object detection in high-resolution remote sensing images has significant potential in various domains such as industrial production, military warning, disaster monitoring, and urban planning. However, the traditional process of remote sensing object detection involves several time-consuming steps, including image acquisition, image download, ground processing, and object detection. These steps may not be suitable for tasks with shorter timeliness requirements, such as military warning and disaster monitoring. Additionally, the transmission of massive data from satellites to the ground is limited by bandwidth, resulting in time delays and redundant information, such as cloud coverage images. To address these challenges and achieve efficient utilization of information, this paper proposes a comprehensive on-board multi-class geospatial object detection scheme. The proposed scheme consists of several steps. Firstly, the satellite imagery is sliced, and the PID-Net (Proportional-Integral-Derivative Network) method is employed to detect and filter out cloud-covered tiles. Subsequently, our Manhattan Intersection over Union (MIOU) loss-based YOLO (You Only Look Once) v7-Tiny method is used to detect remote-sensing objects in the remaining tiles. Finally, the detection results are mapped back to the original image, and the truncated NMS (Non-Maximum Suppression) method is utilized to filter out repeated and noisy boxes. To validate the reliability of the scheme, this paper creates a new dataset called DOTA-CD (Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images-Cloud Detection). Experiments were conducted on both ground and on-board equipment using the AIR-CD dataset, DOTA dataset, and DOTA-CD dataset. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Color-Coated Steel Sheet Roof Building Extraction from External Environment of High-Speed Rail Based on High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

The identification of color-coated steel sheet (CCSS) roof buildings in the external environment is of great significance for the operational security of high-speed rail systems. While high-resolution remote sensing images offer an efficient approach to identify CCSS roof buildings, achieving accurate extraction is challenging due to the complex background in remote sensing images and the extensive scale range of CCSS roof buildings. This research introduces the deformation-aware feature enhancement and alignment network (DFEANet) to address these challenges. DFEANet adaptively adjusts the receptive field to effectively separate the foreground and background facilitated by the deformation-aware feature enhancement module (DFEM). Additionally, feature alignment and gated fusion module (FAGM) is proposed to refine boundaries and preserve structural details, which can ameliorate the misalignment between adjacent features and suppress redundant information during the fusion process. Experimental results on remote sensing images along the Beijing–Zhangjiakou high-speed railway demonstrate the effectiveness of DFEANet. Ablation studies further underscore the enhancement in extraction accuracy due to the proposed modules. Overall, the DFEANet was verified as capable of assisting in the external environment security of high-speed rails.

Open-Pit Mining Area Extraction from High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images Based on EMANet and FC-CRF

Rapid and accurate identification of open-pit mining areas is essential for guiding production planning and assessing environmental impact. Remote sensing technology provides an effective means for open-pit mine boundary identification. In this study, an effective method for delineating an open-pit mining area from remote sensing images is proposed, which is based on the deep learning model of the Expectation-Maximizing Attention Network (EMANet) and the fully connected conditional random field (FC-CRF) algorithm. First, ResNet-34 was applied as the backbone network to obtain preliminary features. Second, the EMA mechanism was used to enhance the learning of important information and details in the image. Finally, a postprocessing program based on FC-CRF was introduced to optimize the initial prediction results. Meanwhile, the extraction effect of MobileNetV3, U-Net, fully convolutional network (FCN), and our method were compared on the same data set for the open-pit mining areas. The advantage of the model is verified by the visual graph results, and the accuracy evaluation index based on the confusion matrix calculation. pixel accuracy (PA), mean intersection over union (MIoU), and kappa were 98.09%, 89.48%, and 88.48%, respectively. The evaluation results show that this method effectively identifies open-pit mining areas. It is of practical significance to complete the extraction task of open-pit mining areas accurately and comprehensively, which can be used for production management and environmental protection of open-pit mines.