Multi-scale Restoration of Missing Data in Optical Time-series Images with Masked Spatial-Temporal Attention Network

Due to factors such as thick cloud cover and sensor limitations, remote sensing images often suffer from significant missing data, resulting in incomplete time-series information. Existing methods for imputing missing values in remote sensing images do not fully exploit spatio-temporal auxiliary information, leading to limited accuracy in restoration. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel deep learning-based approach called MS2TAN (Multi-scale Masked Spatial-Temporal Attention Network), for reconstructing time-series remote sensing images. Firstly, we introduce an efficient spatio-temporal feature extractor based on Masked Spatial-Temporal Attention (MSTA), to obtain high-quality representations of the spatio-temporal neighborhood features in the missing regions. Secondly, a Multi-scale Restoration Network consisting of the MSTA-based Feature Extractors, is employed to progressively refine the missing values by exploring spatio-temporal neighborhood features at different scales. Thirdly, we propose a ``Pixel-Structure-Perception'' Multi-Objective Joint Optimization method to enhance the visual effects of the reconstruction results from multiple perspectives and preserve more texture structures. Furthermore, the proposed method reconstructs missing values in all input temporal phases in parallel (i.e., Multi-In Multi-Out), achieving higher processing efficiency. Finally, experimental evaluations on two typical missing data restoration tasks across multiple research areas demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with an improvement of 0.40dB/1.17dB in mean peak signal-to-noise ratio (mPSNR) and 3.77/9.41 thousandths in mean structural similarity (mSSIM), while exhibiting stronger texture and structural consistency.

On the Opportunities of Green Computing: A Survey

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has achieved significant advancements in technology and research with the development over several decades, and is widely used in many areas including computing vision, natural language processing, time-series analysis, speech synthesis, etc. During the age of deep learning, especially with the arise of Large Language Models, a large majority of researchers' attention is paid on pursuing new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results, resulting in ever increasing of model size and computational complexity. The needs for high computing power brings higher carbon emission and undermines research fairness by preventing small or medium-sized research institutions and companies with limited funding in participating in research. To tackle the challenges of computing resources and environmental impact of AI, Green Computing has become a hot research topic. In this survey, we give a systematic overview of the technologies used in Green Computing. We propose the framework of Green Computing and devide it into four key components: (1) Measures of Greenness, (2) Energy-Efficient AI, (3) Energy-Efficient Computing Systems and (4) AI Use Cases for Sustainability. For each components, we discuss the research progress made and the commonly used techniques to optimize the AI efficiency. We conclude that this new research direction has the potential to address the conflicts between resource constraints and AI development. We encourage more researchers to put attention on this direction and make AI more environmental friendly.