Generalized Few-Shot Meets Remote Sensing: Discovering Novel Classes in Land Cover Mapping via Hybrid Semantic Segmentation Framework

Land-cover mapping is one of the vital applications in Earth observation, aiming at classifying each pixel's land-cover type of remote-sensing images. As natural and human activities change the landscape, the land-cover map needs to be rapidly updated. However, discovering newly appeared land-cover types in existing classification systems is still a non-trivial task hindered by various scales of complex land objects and insufficient labeled data over a wide-span geographic area. In this paper, we propose a generalized few-shot segmentation-based framework, named SegLand, to update novel classes in high-resolution land-cover mapping. Specifically, the proposed framework is designed in three parts: (a) Data pre-processing: the base training set and the few-shot support sets of novel classes are analyzed and augmented; (b) Hybrid segmentation structure; Multiple base learners and a modified Projection onto Orthogonal Prototypes (POP) network are combined to enhance the base-class recognition and to dig novel classes from insufficient labels data; (c) Ultimate fusion: the semantic segmentation results of the base learners and POP network are reasonably fused. The proposed framework has won first place in the leaderboard of the OpenEarthMap Land Cover Mapping Few-Shot Challenge. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of the framework for automatically updating novel land-cover classes with limited labeled data.

Securing the Sensing Functionality in ISAC Networks: An Artificial Noise Design

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) systems employ dual-functional signals to simultaneously accomplish radar sensing and wireless communication tasks. However, ISAC systems open up new sensing security vulnerabilities to malicious illegitimate eavesdroppers (Eves) that can also exploit the transmitted waveform to extract sensing information from the environment. In this paper, we investigate the beamforming design to enhance the sensing security of an ISAC system, where the communication user (CU) serves as a sensing Eve. Our objective is to maximize the mutual information (MI) for the legitimate radar sensing receiver while considering the constraint of the MI for the Eve and the quality of service to the CUs. Then, we consider the artificial noise (AN)-aided beamforming to further enhance the sensing security. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed methods achieve MI improvement of the legitimate receiver while limiting the sensing MI of the Eve, compared with the baseline scheme, and that the utilization of AN further contributes to sensing security.

Energy-Efficient Beamforming Design for Integrated Sensing and Communications Systems

In this paper, we investigate the design of energy-efficient beamforming for an ISAC system, where the transmitted waveform is optimized for joint multi-user communication and target estimation simultaneously. We aim to maximize the system energy efficiency (EE), taking into account the constraints of a maximum transmit power budget, a minimum required signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for communication, and a maximum tolerable Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for target estimation. We first consider communication-centric EE maximization. To handle the non-convex fractional objective function, we propose an iterative quadratic-transform-Dinkelbach method, where Schur complement and semi-definite relaxation (SDR) techniques are leveraged to solve the subproblem in each iteration. For the scenarios where sensing is critical, we propose a novel performance metric for characterizing the sensing-centric EE and optimize the metric adopted in the scenario of sensing a point-like target and an extended target. To handle the nonconvexity, we employ the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique to develop an efficient algorithm for approximating the nonconvex problem as a sequence of convex ones. Furthermore, we adopt a Pareto optimization mechanism to articulate the tradeoff between the communication-centric EE and sensing-centric EE. We formulate the search of the Pareto boundary as a constrained optimization problem and propose a computationally efficient algorithm to handle it. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms compared with the baseline schemes and the obtained approximate Pareto boundary shows that there is a non-trivial tradeoff between communication-centric EE and sensing-centric EE, where the number of communication users and EE requirements have serious effects on the achievable tradeoff.

Integrated Sensing and Communications: Recent Advances and Ten Open Challenges

It is anticipated that integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) would be one of the key enablers of next-generation wireless networks (such as beyond 5G (B5G) and 6G) for supporting a variety of emerging applications. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the recent advances in ISAC systems, with a particular focus on their foundations, system design, networking aspects and ISAC applications. Furthermore, we discuss the corresponding open questions of the above that emerged in each issue. Hence, we commence with the information theory of sensing and communications (S$\&$C), followed by the information-theoretic limits of ISAC systems by shedding light on the fundamental performance metrics. Next, we discuss their clock synchronization and phase offset problems, the associated Pareto-optimal signaling strategies, as well as the associated super-resolution ISAC system design. Moreover, we envision that ISAC ushers in a paradigm shift for the future cellular networks relying on network sensing, transforming the classic cellular architecture, cross-layer resource management methods, and transmission protocols. In ISAC applications, we further highlight the security and privacy issues of wireless sensing. Finally, we close by studying the recent advances in a representative ISAC use case, namely the multi-object multi-task (MOMT) recognition problem using wireless signals.

Hard-aware Instance Adaptive Self-training for Unsupervised Cross-domain Semantic Segmentation

The divergence between labeled training data and unlabeled testing data is a significant challenge for recent deep learning models. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) attempts to solve such problem. Recent works show that self-training is a powerful approach to UDA. However, existing methods have difficulty in balancing the scalability and performance. In this paper, we propose a hard-aware instance adaptive self-training framework for UDA on the task of semantic segmentation. To effectively improve the quality and diversity of pseudo-labels, we develop a novel pseudo-label generation strategy with an instance adaptive selector. We further enrich the hard class pseudo-labels with inter-image information through a skillfully designed hard-aware pseudo-label augmentation. Besides, we propose the region-adaptive regularization to smooth the pseudo-label region and sharpen the non-pseudo-label region. For the non-pseudo-label region, consistency constraint is also constructed to introduce stronger supervision signals during model optimization. Our method is so concise and efficient that it is easy to be generalized to other UDA methods. Experiments on GTA5 to Cityscapes, SYNTHIA to Cityscapes, and Cityscapes to Oxford RobotCar demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Instance Adaptive Self-Training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

The divergence between labeled training data and unlabeled testing data is a significant challenge for recent deep learning models. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) attempts to solve such a problem. Recent works show that self-training is a powerful approach to UDA. However, existing methods have difficulty in balancing scalability and performance. In this paper, we propose an instance adaptive self-training framework for UDA on the task of semantic segmentation. To effectively improve the quality of pseudo-labels, we develop a novel pseudo-label generation strategy with an instance adaptive selector. Besides, we propose the region-guided regularization to smooth the pseudo-label region and sharpen the non-pseudo-label region. Our method is so concise and efficient that it is easy to be generalized to other unsupervised domain adaptation methods. Experiments on 'GTA5 to Cityscapes' and 'SYNTHIA to Cityscapes' demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared with the state-of-the-art methods.