Monte Carlo Linear Clustering with Single-Point Supervision is Enough for Infrared Small Target Detection

Single-frame infrared small target (SIRST) detection aims at separating small targets from clutter backgrounds on infrared images. Recently, deep learning based methods have achieved promising performance on SIRST detection, but at the cost of a large amount of training data with expensive pixel-level annotations. To reduce the annotation burden, we propose the first method to achieve SIRST detection with single-point supervision. The core idea of this work is to recover the per-pixel mask of each target from the given single point label by using clustering approaches, which looks simple but is indeed challenging since targets are always insalient and accompanied with background clutters. To handle this issue, we introduce randomness to the clustering process by adding noise to the input images, and then obtain much more reliable pseudo masks by averaging the clustered results. Thanks to this "Monte Carlo" clustering approach, our method can accurately recover pseudo masks and thus turn arbitrary fully supervised SIRST detection networks into weakly supervised ones with only single point annotation. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate that our method can be applied to existing SIRST detection networks to achieve comparable performance with their fully supervised counterparts, which reveals that single-point supervision is strong enough for SIRST detection. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/YeRen123455/SIRST-Single-Point-Supervision.

You Only Train Once: Learning a General Anomaly Enhancement Network with Random Masks for Hyperspectral Anomaly Detection

In this paper, we introduce a new approach to address the challenge of generalization in hyperspectral anomaly detection (AD). Our method eliminates the need for adjusting parameters or retraining on new test scenes as required by most existing methods. Employing an image-level training paradigm, we achieve a general anomaly enhancement network for hyperspectral AD that only needs to be trained once. Trained on a set of anomaly-free hyperspectral images with random masks, our network can learn the spatial context characteristics between anomalies and background in an unsupervised way. Additionally, a plug-and-play model selection module is proposed to search for a spatial-spectral transform domain that is more suitable for AD task than the original data. To establish a unified benchmark to comprehensively evaluate our method and existing methods, we develop a large-scale hyperspectral AD dataset (HAD100) that includes 100 real test scenes with diverse anomaly targets. In comparison experiments, we combine our network with a parameter-free detector and achieve the optimal balance between detection accuracy and inference speed among state-of-the-art AD methods. Experimental results also show that our method still achieves competitive performance when the training and test set are captured by different sensor devices. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhaoxuLi123/AETNet.

MTU-Net: Multi-level TransUNet for Space-based Infrared Tiny Ship Detection

Space-based infrared tiny ship detection aims at separating tiny ships from the images captured by earth orbiting satellites. Due to the extremely large image coverage area (e.g., thousands square kilometers), candidate targets in these images are much smaller, dimer, more changeable than those targets observed by aerial-based and land-based imaging devices. Existing short imaging distance-based infrared datasets and target detection methods cannot be well adopted to the space-based surveillance task. To address these problems, we develop a space-based infrared tiny ship detection dataset (namely, NUDT-SIRST-Sea) with 48 space-based infrared images and 17598 pixel-level tiny ship annotations. Each image covers about 10000 square kilometers of area with 10000X10000 pixels. Considering the extreme characteristics (e.g., small, dim, changeable) of those tiny ships in such challenging scenes, we propose a multi-level TransUNet (MTU-Net) in this paper. Specifically, we design a Vision Transformer (ViT) Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) hybrid encoder to extract multi-level features. Local feature maps are first extracted by several convolution layers and then fed into the multi-level feature extraction module (MVTM) to capture long-distance dependency. We further propose a copy-rotate-resize-paste (CRRP) data augmentation approach to accelerate the training phase, which effectively alleviates the issue of sample imbalance between targets and background. Besides, we design a FocalIoU loss to achieve both target localization and shape description. Experimental results on the NUDT-SIRST-Sea dataset show that our MTU-Net outperforms traditional and existing deep learning based SIRST methods in terms of probability of detection, false alarm rate and intersection over union.

Learning a Degradation-Adaptive Network for Light Field Image Super-Resolution

Recent years have witnessed the great advances of deep neural networks (DNNs) in light field (LF) image super-resolution (SR). However, existing DNN-based LF image SR methods are developed on a single fixed degradation (e.g., bicubic downsampling), and thus cannot be applied to super-resolve real LF images with diverse degradations. In this paper, we propose the first method to handle LF image SR with multiple degradations. In our method, a practical LF degradation model that considers blur and noise is developed to approximate the degradation process of real LF images. Then, a degradation-adaptive network (LF-DAnet) is designed to incorporate the degradation prior into the SR process. By training on LF images with multiple synthetic degradations, our method can learn to adapt to different degradations while incorporating the spatial and angular information. Extensive experiments on both synthetically degraded and real-world LFs demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Compared with existing state-of-the-art single and LF image SR methods, our method achieves superior SR performance under a wide range of degradations, and generalizes better to real LF images. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/YingqianWang/LF-DAnet.

Occlusion-Aware Cost Constructor for Light Field Depth Estimation

Matching cost construction is a key step in light field (LF) depth estimation, but was rarely studied in the deep learning era. Recent deep learning-based LF depth estimation methods construct matching cost by sequentially shifting each sub-aperture image (SAI) with a series of predefined offsets, which is complex and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a simple and fast cost constructor to construct matching cost for LF depth estimation. Our cost constructor is composed by a series of convolutions with specifically designed dilation rates. By applying our cost constructor to SAI arrays, pixels under predefined disparities can be integrated and matching cost can be constructed without using any shifting operation. More importantly, the proposed cost constructor is occlusion-aware and can handle occlusions by dynamically modulating pixels from different views. Based on the proposed cost constructor, we develop a deep network for LF depth estimation. Our network ranks first on the commonly used 4D LF benchmark in terms of the mean square error (MSE), and achieves a faster running time than other state-of-the-art methods.

Disentangling Light Fields for Super-Resolution and Disparity Estimation

Light field (LF) cameras record both intensity and directions of light rays, and encode 3D scenes into 4D LF images. Recently, many convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been proposed for various LF image processing tasks. However, it is challenging for CNNs to effectively process LF images since the spatial and angular information are highly inter-twined with varying disparities. In this paper, we propose a generic mechanism to disentangle these coupled information for LF image processing. Specifically, we first design a class of domain-specific convolutions to disentangle LFs from different dimensions, and then leverage these disentangled features by designing task-specific modules. Our disentangling mechanism can well incorporate the LF structure prior and effectively handle 4D LF data. Based on the proposed mechanism, we develop three networks (i.e., DistgSSR, DistgASR and DistgDisp) for spatial super-resolution, angular super-resolution and disparity estimation. Experimental results show that our networks achieve state-of-the-art performance on all these three tasks, which demonstrates the effectiveness, efficiency, and generality of our disentangling mechanism. Project page: https://yingqianwang.github.io/DistgLF/.

Detecting and Tracking Small and Dense Moving Objects in Satellite Videos: A Benchmark

Satellite video cameras can provide continuous observation for a large-scale area, which is important for many remote sensing applications. However, achieving moving object detection and tracking in satellite videos remains challenging due to the insufficient appearance information of objects and lack of high-quality datasets. In this paper, we first build a large-scale satellite video dataset with rich annotations for the task of moving object detection and tracking. This dataset is collected by the Jilin-1 satellite constellation and composed of 47 high-quality videos with 1,646,038 instances of interest for object detection and 3,711 trajectories for object tracking. We then introduce a motion modeling baseline to improve the detection rate and reduce false alarms based on accumulative multi-frame differencing and robust matrix completion. Finally, we establish the first public benchmark for moving object detection and tracking in satellite videos, and extensively evaluate the performance of several representative approaches on our dataset. Comprehensive experimental analyses and insightful conclusions are also provided. The dataset is available at https://github.com/QingyongHu/VISO.

Dense Dual-Attention Network for Light Field Image Super-Resolution

Light field (LF) images can be used to improve the performance of image super-resolution (SR) because both angular and spatial information is available. It is challenging to incorporate distinctive information from different views for LF image SR. Moreover, the long-term information from the previous layers can be weakened as the depth of network increases. In this paper, we propose a dense dual-attention network for LF image SR. Specifically, we design a view attention module to adaptively capture discriminative features across different views and a channel attention module to selectively focus on informative information across all channels. These two modules are fed to two branches and stacked separately in a chain structure for adaptive fusion of hierarchical features and distillation of valid information. Meanwhile, a dense connection is used to fully exploit multi-level information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our dense dual-attention mechanism can capture informative information across views and channels to improve SR performance. Comparative results show the advantage of our method over state-of-the-art methods on public datasets.

Selective Light Field Refocusing for Camera Arrays Using Bokeh Rendering and Superresolution

Camera arrays provide spatial and angular information within a single snapshot. With refocusing methods, focal planes can be altered after exposure. In this letter, we propose a light field refocusing method to improve the imaging quality of camera arrays. In our method, the disparity is first estimated. Then, the unfocused region (bokeh) is rendered by using a depth-based anisotropic filter. Finally, the refocused image is produced by a reconstruction-based superresolution approach where the bokeh image is used as a regularization term. Our method can selectively refocus images with focused region being superresolved and bokeh being aesthetically rendered. Our method also enables postadjustment of depth of field. We conduct experiments on both public and self-developed datasets. Our method achieves superior visual performance with acceptable computational cost as compared to other state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/YingqianWang/Selective-LF-Refocusing.

Dense Nested Attention Network for Infrared Small Target Detection

Single-frame infrared small target (SIRST) detection aims at separating small targets from clutter backgrounds. With the advances of deep learning, CNN-based methods have yielded promising results in generic object detection due to their powerful modeling capability. However, existing CNN-based methods cannot be directly applied for infrared small targets since pooling layers in their networks could lead to the loss of targets in deep layers. To handle this problem, we propose a dense nested attention network (DNANet) in this paper. Specifically, we design a dense nested interactive module (DNIM) to achieve progressive interaction among high-level and low-level features. With the repeated interaction in DNIM, infrared small targets in deep layers can be maintained. Based on DNIM, we further propose a cascaded channel and spatial attention module (CSAM) to adaptively enhance multi-level features. With our DNANet, contextual information of small targets can be well incorporated and fully exploited by repeated fusion and enhancement. Moreover, we develop an infrared small target dataset (namely, NUDT-SIRST) and propose a set of evaluation metrics to conduct comprehensive performance evaluation. Experiments on both public and our self-developed datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Compared to other state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves better performance in terms of probability of detection (Pd), false-alarm rate (Fa), and intersection of union (IoU).