No Arabic abstract
The current practice in land cover/land use change analysis relies heavily on the individually classified maps of the multitemporal data set. Due to varying acquisition conditions (e.g., illumination, sensors, seasonal differences), the classification maps yielded are often inconsistent through time for robust statistical analysis. 3D geometric features have been shown to be stable for assessing differences across the temporal data set. Therefore, in this article we investigate he use of a multitemporal orthophoto and digital surface model derived from satellite data for spatiotemporal classification. Our approach consists of two major steps: generating per-class probability distribution maps using the random-forest classifier with limited training samples, and making spatiotemporal inferences using an iterative 3D spatiotemporal filter operating on per-class probability maps. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods can consistently improve the individual classification results by 2%-6% and thus can be an important postclassification refinement approach.
Earth observation technologies, such as optical imaging and synthetic aperture radar (SAR), provide excellent means to monitor ever-growing urban environments continuously. Notably, in the case of large-scale disasters (e.g., tsunamis and earthquakes), in which a response is highly time-critical, images from both data modalities can complement each other to accurately convey the full damage condition in the disasters aftermath. However, due to several factors, such as weather and satellite coverage, it is often uncertain which data modality will be the first available for rapid disaster response efforts. Hence, novel methodologies that can utilize all accessible EO datasets are essential for disaster management. In this study, we have developed a global multisensor and multitemporal dataset for building damage mapping. We included building damage characteristics from three disaster types, namely, earthquakes, tsunamis, and typhoons, and considered three building damage categories. The global dataset contains high-resolution optical imagery and high-to-moderate-resolution multiband SAR data acquired before and after each disaster. Using this comprehensive dataset, we analyzed five data modality scenarios for damage mapping: single-mode (optical and SAR datasets), cross-modal (pre-disaster optical and post-disaster SAR datasets), and mode fusion scenarios. We defined a damage mapping framework for the semantic segmentation of damaged buildings based on a deep convolutional neural network algorithm. We compare our approach to another state-of-the-art baseline model for damage mapping. The results indicated that our dataset, together with a deep learning network, enabled acceptable predictions for all the data modality scenarios.
In recent years, improvements in various image acquisition techniques gave rise to the need for adaptive processing methods, aimed particularly for large datasets corrupted by noise and deformations. In this work, we consider datasets of images sampled from a low-dimensional manifold (i.e. an image-valued manifold), where the images can assume arbitrary planar rotations. To derive an adaptive and rotation-invariant framework for processing such datasets, we introduce a graph Laplacian (GL)-like operator over the dataset, termed ${textit{steerable graph Laplacian}}$. Essentially, the steerable GL extends the standard GL by accounting for all (infinitely-many) planar rotations of all images. As it turns out, similarly to the standard GL, a properly normalized steerable GL converges to the Laplace-Beltrami operator on the low-dimensional manifold. However, the steerable GL admits an improved convergence rate compared to the GL, where the improved convergence behaves as if the intrinsic dimension of the underlying manifold is lower by one. Moreover, it is shown that the steerable GL admits eigenfunctions of the form of Fourier modes (along the orbits of the images rotations) multiplied by eigenvectors of certain matrices, which can be computed efficiently by the FFT. For image datasets corrupted by noise, we employ a subset of these eigenfunctions to filter the dataset via a Fourier-like filtering scheme, essentially using all images and their rotations simultaneously. We demonstrate our filtering framework by de-noising simulated single-particle cryo-EM image datasets.
Convolutional operations have two limitations: (1) do not explicitly model where to focus as the same filter is applied to all the positions, and (2) are unsuitable for modeling long-range dependencies as they only operate on a small neighborhood. While both limitations can be alleviated by attention operations, many design choices remain to be determined to use attention, especially when applying attention to videos. Towards a principled way of applying attention to videos, we address the task of spatiotemporal attention cell search. We propose a novel search space for spatiotemporal attention cells, which allows the search algorithm to flexibly explore various design choices in the cell. The discovered attention cells can be seamlessly inserted into existing backbone networks, e.g., I3D or S3D, and improve video classification accuracy by more than 2% on both Kinetics-600 and MiT datasets. The discovered attention cells outperform non-local blocks on both datasets, and demonstrate strong generalization across different modalities, backbones, and datasets. Inserting our attention cells into I3D-R50 yields state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.
We consider the problem of obtaining dense 3D reconstructions of humans from single and partially occluded views. In such cases, the visual evidence is usually insufficient to identify a 3D reconstruction uniquely, so we aim at recovering several plausible reconstructions compatible with the input data. We suggest that ambiguities can be modelled more effectively by parametrizing the possible body shapes and poses via a suitable 3D model, such as SMPL for humans. We propose to learn a multi-hypothesis neural network regressor using a best-of-M loss, where each of the M hypotheses is constrained to lie on a manifold of plausible human poses by means of a generative model. We show that our method outperforms alternative approaches in ambiguous pose recovery on standard benchmarks for 3D humans, and in heavily occlud
Real-world text classification tasks often require many labeled training examples that are expensive to obtain. Recent advancements in machine teaching, specifically the data programming paradigm, facilitate the creation of training data sets quickly via a general framework for building weak models, also known as labeling functions, and denoising them through ensemble learning techniques. We present a fast, simple data programming method for augmenting text data sets by generating neighborhood-based weak models with minimal supervision. Furthermore, our method employs an iterative procedure to identify sparsely distributed examples from large volumes of unlabeled data. The iterative data programming techniques improve newer weak models as more labeled data is confirmed with human-in-loop. We show empirical results on sentence classification tasks, including those from a task of improving intent recognition in conversational agents.