ELGC-Net: Efficient Local-Global Context Aggregation for Remote Sensing Change Detection

Deep learning has shown remarkable success in remote sensing change detection (CD), aiming to identify semantic change regions between co-registered satellite image pairs acquired at distinct time stamps. However, existing convolutional neural network and transformer-based frameworks often struggle to accurately segment semantic change regions. Moreover, transformers-based methods with standard self-attention suffer from quadratic computational complexity with respect to the image resolution, making them less practical for CD tasks with limited training data. To address these issues, we propose an efficient change detection framework, ELGC-Net, which leverages rich contextual information to precisely estimate change regions while reducing the model size. Our ELGC-Net comprises a Siamese encoder, fusion modules, and a decoder. The focus of our design is the introduction of an Efficient Local-Global Context Aggregator module within the encoder, capturing enhanced global context and local spatial information through a novel pooled-transpose (PT) attention and depthwise convolution, respectively. The PT attention employs pooling operations for robust feature extraction and minimizes computational cost with transposed attention. Extensive experiments on three challenging CD datasets demonstrate that ELGC-Net outperforms existing methods. Compared to the recent transformer-based CD approach (ChangeFormer), ELGC-Net achieves a 1.4% gain in intersection over union metric on the LEVIR-CD dataset, while significantly reducing trainable parameters. Our proposed ELGC-Net sets a new state-of-the-art performance in remote sensing change detection benchmarks. Finally, we also introduce ELGC-Net-LW, a lighter variant with significantly reduced computational complexity, suitable for resource-constrained settings, while achieving comparable performance. Project url https://github.com/techmn/elgcnet.

Rethinking Transformers Pre-training for Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagery

Recent advances in unsupervised learning have demonstrated the ability of large vision models to achieve promising results on downstream tasks by pre-training on large amount of unlabelled data. Such pre-training techniques have also been explored recently in the remote sensing domain due to the availability of large amount of unlabelled data. Different from standard natural image datasets, remote sensing data is acquired from various sensor technologies and exhibit diverse range of scale variations as well as modalities. Existing satellite image pre-training methods either ignore the scale information present in the remote sensing imagery or restrict themselves to use only a single type of data modality. In this paper, we re-visit transformers pre-training and leverage multi-scale information that is effectively utilized with multiple modalities. Our proposed approach, named SatMAE++, performs multi-scale pre-training and utilizes convolution based upsampling blocks to reconstruct the image at higher scales making it extensible to include more scales. Compared to existing works, the proposed SatMAE++ with multi-scale pre-training is equally effective for both optical as well as multi-spectral imagery. Extensive experiments on six datasets reveal the merits of proposed contributions, leading to state-of-the-art performance on all datasets. SatMAE++ achieves mean average precision (mAP) gain of 2.5\% for multi-label classification task on BigEarthNet dataset. Our code and pre-trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/techmn/satmae_pp}.

Remote Sensing Change Detection With Transformers Trained from Scratch

Current transformer-based change detection (CD) approaches either employ a pre-trained model trained on large-scale image classification ImageNet dataset or rely on first pre-training on another CD dataset and then fine-tuning on the target benchmark. This current strategy is driven by the fact that transformers typically require a large amount of training data to learn inductive biases, which is insufficient in standard CD datasets due to their small size. We develop an end-to-end CD approach with transformers that is trained from scratch and yet achieves state-of-the-art performance on four public benchmarks. Instead of using conventional self-attention that struggles to capture inductive biases when trained from scratch, our architecture utilizes a shuffled sparse-attention operation that focuses on selected sparse informative regions to capture the inherent characteristics of the CD data. Moreover, we introduce a change-enhanced feature fusion (CEFF) module to fuse the features from input image pairs by performing a per-channel re-weighting. Our CEFF module aids in enhancing the relevant semantic changes while suppressing the noisy ones. Extensive experiments on four CD datasets reveal the merits of the proposed contributions, achieving gains as high as 14.27\% in intersection-over-union (IoU) score, compared to the best-published results in the literature. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/mustansarfiaz/ScratchFormer}.

AVisT: A Benchmark for Visual Object Tracking in Adverse Visibility

One of the key factors behind the recent success in visual tracking is the availability of dedicated benchmarks. While being greatly benefiting to the tracking research, existing benchmarks do not pose the same difficulty as before with recent trackers achieving higher performance mainly due to (i) the introduction of more sophisticated transformers-based methods and (ii) the lack of diverse scenarios with adverse visibility such as, severe weather conditions, camouflage and imaging effects. We introduce AVisT, a dedicated benchmark for visual tracking in diverse scenarios with adverse visibility. AVisT comprises 120 challenging sequences with 80k annotated frames, spanning 18 diverse scenarios broadly grouped into five attributes with 42 object categories. The key contribution of AVisT is diverse and challenging scenarios covering severe weather conditions such as, dense fog, heavy rain and sandstorm; obstruction effects including, fire, sun glare and splashing water; adverse imaging effects such as, low-light; target effects including, small targets and distractor objects along with camouflage. We further benchmark 17 popular and recent trackers on AVisT with detailed analysis of their tracking performance across attributes, demonstrating a big room for improvement in performance. We believe that AVisT can greatly benefit the tracking community by complementing the existing benchmarks, in developing new creative tracking solutions in order to continue pushing the boundaries of the state-of-the-art. Our dataset along with the complete tracking performance evaluation is available at: https://github.com/visionml/pytracking