GLSD: The Global Large-Scale Ship Database and Baseline Evaluations

In this paper, we introduce a challenging global large-scale ship database (called GLSD), designed specifically for ship detection tasks. The designed GLSD database includes a total of 140,616 annotated instances from 100,729 images. Based on the collected images, we propose 13 categories that widely exists in international routes. These categories include sailing boat, fishing boat, passenger ship, war ship, general cargo ship, container ship, bulk cargo carrier, barge, ore carrier, speed boat, canoe, oil carrier, and tug. The motivations of developing GLSD include the following: 1) providing a refined ship detection database; 2) providing the worldwide researchers of ship detection and exhaustive label information (bounding box and ship class label) in one uniform global database; and 3) providing a large-scale ship database with geographic information (port and country information) that benefits multi-modal analysis. In addition, we discuss the evaluation protocols given image characteristics in GLSD and analyze the performance of selected state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on GSLD, providing baselines for future studies. More information regarding the designed GLSD can be found at https://github.com/jiaming-wang/GLSD.

Pan-sharpening via High-pass Modification Convolutional Neural Network

Most existing deep learning-based pan-sharpening methods have several widely recognized issues, such as spectral distortion and insufficient spatial texture enhancement, we propose a novel pan-sharpening convolutional neural network based on a high-pass modification block. Different from existing methods, the proposed block is designed to learn the high-pass information, leading to enhance spatial information in each band of the multi-spectral-resolution images. To facilitate the generation of visually appealing pan-sharpened images, we propose a perceptual loss function and further optimize the model based on high-level features in the near-infrared space. Experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art pan-sharpening methods, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The proposed model is open-sourced at https://github.com/jiaming-wang/HMB.

SSCAN: A Spatial-spectral Cross Attention Network for Hyperspectral Image Denoising

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) have been widely used in a variety of applications thanks to the rich spectral information they are able to provide. Among all HSI processing tasks, HSI denoising is a crucial step. Recently, deep learning-based image denoising methods have made great progress and achieved great performance. However, existing methods tend to ignore the correlations between adjacent spectral bands, leading to problems such as spectral distortion and blurred edges in denoised results. In this study, we propose a novel HSI denoising network, termed SSCAN, that combines group convolutions and attention modules. Specifically, we use a group convolution with a spatial attention module to facilitate feature extraction by directing models' attention to band-wise important features. We propose a spectral-spatial attention block (SSAB) to exploit the spatial and spectral information in hyperspectral images in an effective manner. In addition, we adopt residual learning operations with skip connections to ensure training stability. The experimental results indicate that the proposed SSCAN outperforms several state-of-the-art HSI denoising algorithms.

Unsupervised Remote Sensing Super-Resolution via Migration Image Prior

Recently, satellites with high temporal resolution have fostered wide attention in various practical applications. Due to limitations of bandwidth and hardware cost, however, the spatial resolution of such satellites is considerably low, largely limiting their potentials in scenarios that require spatially explicit information. To improve image resolution, numerous approaches based on training low-high resolution pairs have been proposed to address the super-resolution (SR) task. Despite their success, however, low/high spatial resolution pairs are usually difficult to obtain in satellites with a high temporal resolution, making such approaches in SR impractical to use. In this paper, we proposed a new unsupervised learning framework, called "MIP", which achieves SR tasks without low/high resolution image pairs. First, random noise maps are fed into a designed generative adversarial network (GAN) for reconstruction. Then, the proposed method converts the reference image to latent space as the migration image prior. Finally, we update the input noise via an implicit method, and further transfer the texture and structured information from the reference image. Extensive experimental results on the Draper dataset show that MIP achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. The proposed MIP is open-sourced at http://github.com/jiaming-wang/MIP.

Sensing population distribution from satellite imagery via deep learning: model selection, neighboring effect, and systematic biases

The rapid development of remote sensing techniques provides rich, large-coverage, and high-temporal information of the ground, which can be coupled with the emerging deep learning approaches that enable latent features and hidden geographical patterns to be extracted. This study marks the first attempt to cross-compare performances of popular state-of-the-art deep learning models in estimating population distribution from remote sensing images, investigate the contribution of neighboring effect, and explore the potential systematic population estimation biases. We conduct an end-to-end training of four popular deep learning architectures, i.e., VGG, ResNet, Xception, and DenseNet, by establishing a mapping between Sentinel-2 image patches and their corresponding population count from the LandScan population grid. The results reveal that DenseNet outperforms the other three models, while VGG has the worst performances in all evaluating metrics under all selected neighboring scenarios. As for the neighboring effect, contradicting existing studies, our results suggest that the increase of neighboring sizes leads to reduced population estimation performance, which is found universal for all four selected models in all evaluating metrics. In addition, there exists a notable, universal bias that all selected deep learning models tend to overestimate sparsely populated image patches and underestimate densely populated image patches, regardless of neighboring sizes. The methodological, experimental, and contextual knowledge this study provides is expected to benefit a wide range of future studies that estimate population distribution via remote sensing imagery.

A Bioinspired Approach-Sensitive Neural Network for Collision Detection in Cluttered and Dynamic Backgrounds

Rapid, accurate and robust detection of looming objects in cluttered moving backgrounds is a significant and challenging problem for robotic visual systems to perform collision detection and avoidance tasks. Inspired by the neural circuit of elementary motion vision in the mammalian retina, this paper proposes a bioinspired approach-sensitive neural network (ASNN) that contains three main contributions. Firstly, a direction-selective visual processing module is built based on the spatiotemporal energy framework, which can estimate motion direction accurately via only two mutually perpendicular spatiotemporal filtering channels. Secondly, a novel approach-sensitive neural network is modeled as a push-pull structure formed by ON and OFF pathways, which responds strongly to approaching motion while insensitivity to lateral motion. Finally, a method of directionally selective inhibition is introduced, which is able to suppress the translational backgrounds effectively. Extensive synthetic and real robotic experiments show that the proposed model is able to not only detect collision accurately and robustly in cluttered and dynamic backgrounds but also extract more collision information like position and direction, for guiding rapid decision making.

A Bioinspired Retinal Neural Network for Accurately Extracting Small-Target Motion Information in Cluttered Backgrounds

Robust and accurate detection of small moving targets in cluttered moving backgrounds is a significant and challenging problem for robotic visual systems to perform search and tracking tasks. Inspired by the neural circuitry of elementary motion vision in the mammalian retina, this paper proposes a bioinspired retinal neural network based on a new neurodynamics-based temporal filtering and multiform 2-D spatial Gabor filtering. This model can estimate motion direction accurately via only two perpendicular spatiotemporal filtering signals, and respond to small targets of different sizes and velocities by adjusting the dendrite field size of the spatial filter. Meanwhile, an algorithm of directionally selective inhibition is proposed to suppress the target-like features in the moving background, which can reduce the influence of background motion effectively. Extensive synthetic and real-data experiments show that the proposed model works stably for small targets of a wider size and velocity range, and has better detection performance than other bioinspired models. Additionally, it can also extract the information of motion direction and motion energy accurately and rapidly.

Dynamic Memory based Attention Network for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation has become increasingly essential in various online services. It aims to model the dynamic preferences of users from their historical interactions and predict their next items. The accumulated user behavior records on real systems could be very long. This rich data brings opportunities to track actual interests of users. Prior efforts mainly focus on making recommendations based on relatively recent behaviors. However, the overall sequential data may not be effectively utilized, as early interactions might affect users' current choices. Also, it has become intolerable to scan the entire behavior sequence when performing inference for each user, since real-world system requires short response time. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel long sequential recommendation model, called Dynamic Memory-based Attention Network (DMAN). It segments the overall long behavior sequence into a series of sub-sequences, then trains the model and maintains a set of memory blocks to preserve long-term interests of users. To improve memory fidelity, DMAN dynamically abstracts each user's long-term interest into its own memory blocks by minimizing an auxiliary reconstruction loss. Based on the dynamic memory, the user's short-term and long-term interests can be explicitly extracted and combined for efficient joint recommendation. Empirical results over four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model in capturing long-term dependency over various state-of-the-art sequential models.

Deep Learning in Diabetic Foot Ulcers Detection: A Comprehensive Evaluation

There has been a substantial amount of research on computer methods and technology for the detection and recognition of diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs), but there is a lack of systematic comparisons of state-of-the-art deep learning object detection frameworks applied to this problem. With recent development and data sharing performed as part of the DFU Challenge (DFUC2020) such a comparison becomes possible: DFUC2020 provided participants with a comprehensive dataset consisting of 2,000 images for training each method and 2,000 images for testing them. The following deep learning-based algorithms are compared in this paper: Faster R-CNN, three variants of Faster R-CNN and an ensemble method; YOLOv3; YOLOv5; EfficientDet; and a new Cascade Attention Network. For each deep learning method, we provide a detailed description of model architecture, parameter settings for training and additional stages including pre-processing, data augmentation and post-processing. We provide a comprehensive evaluation for each method. All the methods required a data augmentation stage to increase the number of images available for training and a post-processing stage to remove false positives. The best performance is obtained Deformable Convolution, a variant of Faster R-CNN, with a mAP of 0.6940 and an F1-Score of 0.7434. Finally, we demonstrate that the ensemble method based on different deep learning methods can enhanced the F1-Score but not the mAP. Our results show that state-of-the-art deep learning methods can detect DFU with some accuracy, but there are many challenges ahead before they can be implemented in real world settings.