Leveraging edge detection and neural networks for better UAV localization

We propose a novel method for geolocalizing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in environments lacking Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). Current state-of-the-art techniques employ an offline-trained encoder to generate a vector representation (embedding) of the UAV's current view, which is then compared with pre-computed embeddings of geo-referenced images to determine the UAV's position. Here, we demonstrate that the performance of these methods can be significantly enhanced by preprocessing the images to extract their edges, which exhibit robustness to seasonal and illumination variations. Furthermore, we establish that utilizing edges enhances resilience to orientation and altitude inaccuracies. Additionally, we introduce a confidence criterion for localization. Our findings are substantiated through synthetic experiments.

Exploring Robust Features for Few-Shot Object Detection in Satellite Imagery

The goal of this paper is to perform object detection in satellite imagery with only a few examples, thus enabling users to specify any object class with minimal annotation. To this end, we explore recent methods and ideas from open-vocabulary detection for the remote sensing domain. We develop a few-shot object detector based on a traditional two-stage architecture, where the classification block is replaced by a prototype-based classifier. A large-scale pre-trained model is used to build class-reference embeddings or prototypes, which are compared to region proposal contents for label prediction. In addition, we propose to fine-tune prototypes on available training images to boost performance and learn differences between similar classes, such as aircraft types. We perform extensive evaluations on two remote sensing datasets containing challenging and rare objects. Moreover, we study the performance of both visual and image-text features, namely DINOv2 and CLIP, including two CLIP models specifically tailored for remote sensing applications. Results indicate that visual features are largely superior to vision-language models, as the latter lack the necessary domain-specific vocabulary. Lastly, the developed detector outperforms fully supervised and few-shot methods evaluated on the SIMD and DIOR datasets, despite minimal training parameters.

Fast, nonlocal and neural: a lightweight high quality solution to image denoising

With the widespread application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the traditional model based denoising algorithms are now outperformed. However, CNNs face two problems. First, they are computationally demanding, which makes their deployment especially difficult for mobile terminals. Second, experimental evidence shows that CNNs often over-smooth regular textures present in images, in contrast to traditional non-local models. In this letter, we propose a solution to both issues by combining a nonlocal algorithm with a lightweight residual CNN. This solution gives full latitude to the advantages of both models. We apply this framework to two GPU implementations of classic nonlocal algorithms (NLM and BM3D) and observe a substantial gain in both cases, performing better than the state-of-the-art with low computational requirements. Our solution is between 10 and 20 times faster than CNNs with equivalent performance and attains higher PSNR. In addition the final method shows a notable gain on images containing complex textures like the ones of the MIT Moire dataset.

Radar Fields: An Extension of Radiance Fields to SAR

Radiance fields have been a major breakthrough in the field of inverse rendering, novel view synthesis and 3D modeling of complex scenes from multi-view image collections. Since their introduction, it was shown that they could be extended to other modalities such as LiDAR, radio frequencies, X-ray or ultrasound. In this paper, we show that, despite the important difference between optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image formation models, it is possible to extend radiance fields to radar images thus presenting the first "radar fields". This allows us to learn surface models using only collections of radar images, similar to how regular radiance fields are learned and with the same computational complexity on average. Thanks to similarities in how both fields are defined, this work also shows a potential for hybrid methods combining both optical and SAR images.

On the Importance of Large Objects in CNN Based Object Detection Algorithms

Object detection models, a prominent class of machine learning algorithms, aim to identify and precisely locate objects in images or videos. However, this task might yield uneven performances sometimes caused by the objects sizes and the quality of the images and labels used for training. In this paper, we highlight the importance of large objects in learning features that are critical for all sizes. Given these findings, we propose to introduce a weighting term into the training loss. This term is a function of the object area size. We show that giving more weight to large objects leads to improved detection scores across all object sizes and so an overall improvement in Object Detectors performances (+2 p.p. of mAP on small objects, +2 p.p. on medium and +4 p.p. on large on COCO val 2017 with InternImage-T). Additional experiments and ablation studies with different models and on a different dataset further confirm the robustness of our findings.

Reducing False Alarms in Video Surveillance by Deep Feature Statistical Modeling

Detecting relevant changes is a fundamental problem of video surveillance. Because of the high variability of data and the difficulty of properly annotating changes, unsupervised methods dominate the field. Arguably one of the most critical issues to make them practical is to reduce their false alarm rate. In this work, we develop a method-agnostic weakly supervised a-contrario validation process, based on high dimensional statistical modeling of deep features, to reduce the number of false alarms of any change detection algorithm. We also raise the insufficiency of the conventionally used pixel-wise evaluation, as it fails to precisely capture the performance needs of most real applications. For this reason, we complement pixel-wise metrics with object-wise metrics and evaluate the impact of our approach at both pixel and object levels, on six methods and several sequences from different datasets. Experimental results reveal that the proposed a-contrario validation is able to largely reduce the number of false alarms at both pixel and object levels.

IAdet: Simplest human-in-the-loop object detection

This work proposes a strategy for training models while annotating data named Intelligent Annotation (IA). IA involves three modules: (1) assisted data annotation, (2) background model training, and (3) active selection of the next datapoints. Under this framework, we open-source the IAdet tool, which is specific for single-class object detection. Additionally, we devise a method for automatically evaluating such a human-in-the-loop system. For the PASCAL VOC dataset, the IAdet tool reduces the database annotation time by $25\%$ while providing a trained model for free. These results are obtained for a deliberately very simple IAdet design. As a consequence, IAdet is susceptible to multiple easy improvements, paving the way for powerful human-in-the-loop object detection systems.

Optimal and Efficient Binary Questioning for Human-in-the-Loop Annotation

Even though data annotation is extremely important for interpretability, research and development of artificial intelligence solutions, most research efforts such as active learning or few-shot learning focus on the sample efficiency problem. This paper studies the neglected complementary problem of getting annotated data given a predictor. For the simple binary classification setting, we present the spectrum ranging from optimal general solutions to practical efficient methods. The problem is framed as the full annotation of a binary classification dataset with the minimal number of yes/no questions when a predictor is available. For the case of general binary questions the solution is found in coding theory, where the optimal questioning strategy is given by the Huffman encoding of the possible labelings. However, this approach is computationally intractable even for small dataset sizes. We propose an alternative practical solution based on several heuristics and lookahead minimization of proxy cost functions. The proposed solution is analysed, compared with optimal solutions and evaluated on several synthetic and real-world datasets. On these datasets, the method allows a significant improvement ($23-86\%$) in annotation efficiency.

Collaborative Blind Image Deblurring

Blurry images usually exhibit similar blur at various locations across the image domain, a property barely captured in nowadays blind deblurring neural networks. We show that when extracting patches of similar underlying blur is possible, jointly processing the stack of patches yields superior accuracy than handling them separately. Our collaborative scheme is implemented in a neural architecture with a pooling layer on the stack dimension. We present three practical patch extraction strategies for image sharpening, camera shake removal and optical aberration correction, and validate the proposed approach on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks. For each blur instance, the proposed collaborative strategy yields significant quantitative and qualitative improvements.