From Pixels to Images: Deep Learning Advances in Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation

Remote sensing images (RSIs) capture both natural and human-induced changes on the Earth's surface, serving as essential data for environmental monitoring, urban planning, and resource management. Semantic segmentation (SS) of RSIs enables the fine-grained interpretation of surface features, making it a critical task in remote sensing analysis. With the increasing diversity and volume of RSIs collected by sensors on various platforms, traditional processing methods struggle to maintain efficiency and accuracy. In response, deep learning (DL) has emerged as a transformative approach, enabling substantial advances in remote sensing image semantic segmentation (RSISS) by automating feature extraction and improving segmentation accuracy across diverse modalities. This paper revisits the evolution of DL-based RSISS by categorizing existing approaches into four stages: the early pixel-based methods, the prevailing patch-based and tile-based techniques, and the emerging image-based strategies enabled by foundation models. We analyze these developments from the perspective of feature extraction and learning strategies, revealing the field's progression from pixel-level to tile-level and from unimodal to multimodal segmentation. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of nearly 40 advanced techniques on a unified dataset to quantitatively characterize their performance and applicability. This review offers a holistic view of DL-based SS for RS, highlighting key advancements, comparative insights, and open challenges to guide future research.

COMO: Cross-Mamba Interaction and Offset-Guided Fusion for Multimodal Object Detection

Single-modal object detection tasks often experience performance degradation when encountering diverse scenarios. In contrast, multimodal object detection tasks can offer more comprehensive information about object features by integrating data from various modalities. Current multimodal object detection methods generally use various fusion techniques, including conventional neural networks and transformer-based models, to implement feature fusion strategies and achieve complementary information. However, since multimodal images are captured by different sensors, there are often misalignments between them, making direct matching challenging. This misalignment hinders the ability to establish strong correlations for the same object across different modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called the CrOss-Mamba interaction and Offset-guided fusion (COMO) framework for multimodal object detection tasks. The COMO framework employs the cross-mamba technique to formulate feature interaction equations, enabling multimodal serialized state computation. This results in interactive fusion outputs while reducing computational overhead and improving efficiency. Additionally, COMO leverages high-level features, which are less affected by misalignment, to facilitate interaction and transfer complementary information between modalities, addressing the positional offset challenges caused by variations in camera angles and capture times. Furthermore, COMO incorporates a global and local scanning mechanism in the cross-mamba module to capture features with local correlation, particularly in remote sensing images. To preserve low-level features, the offset-guided fusion mechanism ensures effective multiscale feature utilization, allowing the construction of a multiscale fusion data cube that enhances detection performance.

A Universal Knowledge Embedded Contrastive Learning Framework for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification techniques have been intensively studied and a variety of models have been developed. However, these HSI classification models are confined to pocket models and unrealistic ways of datasets partitioning. The former limits the generalization performance of the model and the latter is partitioned leads to inflated model evaluation metrics, which results in plummeting model performance in the real world. Therefore, we propose a universal knowledge embedded contrastive learning framework (KnowCL) for supervised, unsupervised, and semisupervised HSI classification, which largely closes the gap of HSI classification models between pocket models and standard vision backbones. We present a new HSI processing pipeline in conjunction with a range of data transformation and augmentation techniques that provide diverse data representations and realistic data partitioning. The proposed framework based on this pipeline is compatible with all kinds of backbones and can fully exploit labeled and unlabeled samples with expected training time. Furthermore, we design a new loss function, which can adaptively fuse the supervised loss and unsupervised loss, enhancing the learning performance. This proposed new classification paradigm shows great potentials in exploring for HSI classification technology. The code can be accessed at https://github.com/quanweiliu/KnowCL.

Adapting Vision Transformer for Efficient Change Detection

Most change detection models based on vision transformers currently follow a "pretraining then fine-tuning" strategy. This involves initializing the model weights using large scale classification datasets, which can be either natural images or remote sensing images. However, fully tuning such a model requires significant time and resources. In this paper, we propose an efficient tuning approach that involves freezing the parameters of the pretrained image encoder and introducing additional training parameters. Through this approach, we have achieved competitive or even better results while maintaining extremely low resource consumption across six change detection benchmarks. For example, training time on LEVIR-CD, a change detection benchmark, is only half an hour with 9 GB memory usage, which could be very convenient for most researchers. Additionally, the decoupled tuning framework can be extended to any pretrained model for semantic change detection and multi temporal change detection as well. We hope that our proposed approach will serve as a part of foundational model to inspire more unified training approaches on change detection in the future.

Unpaired MRI Super Resolution with Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning

High-resolution (HR) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is crucial for enhancing diagnostic accuracy in clinical settings. Nonetheless, the inherent limitation of MRI resolution restricts its widespread applicability. Deep learning-based image super-resolution (SR) methods exhibit promise in improving MRI resolution without additional cost. However, these methods frequently require a substantial number of HR MRI images for training, which can be challenging to acquire. In this paper, we propose an unpaired MRI SR approach that employs self-supervised contrastive learning to enhance SR performance with limited training data. Our approach leverages both authentic HR images and synthetically generated SR images to construct positive and negative sample pairs, thus facilitating the learning of discriminative features. Empirical results presented in this study underscore significant enhancements in the peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity index, even when a paucity of HR images is available. These findings accentuate the potential of our approach in addressing the challenge of limited training data, thereby contributing to the advancement of high-resolution MRI in clinical applications.