Road extraction is an essential step in building autonomous navigation systems. Detecting road segments is challenging as they are of varying widths, bifurcated throughout the image, and are often occluded by terrain, cloud, or other weather conditio
ns. Using just convolution neural networks (ConvNets) for this problem is not effective as it is inefficient at capturing distant dependencies between road segments in the image which is essential to extract road connectivity. To this end, we propose a Spatial and Interaction Space Graph Reasoning (SPIN) module which when plugged into a ConvNet performs reasoning over graphs constructed on spatial and interaction spaces projected from the feature maps. Reasoning over spatial space extracts dependencies between different spatial regions and other contextual information. Reasoning over a projected interaction space helps in appropriate delineation of roads from other topographies present in the image. Thus, SPIN extracts long-range dependencies between road segments and effectively delineates roads from other semantics. We also introduce a SPIN pyramid which performs SPIN graph reasoning across multiple scales to extract multi-scale features. We propose a network based on stacked hourglass modules and SPIN pyramid for road segmentation which achieves better performance compared to existing methods. Moreover, our method is computationally efficient and significantly boosts the convergence speed during training, making it feasible for applying on large-scale high-resolution aerial images. Code available at: https://github.com/wgcban/SPIN_RoadMapper.git.
In image fusion, images obtained from different sensors are fused to generate a single image with enhanced information. In recent years, state-of-the-art methods have adopted Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) to encode meaningful features for image
fusion. Specifically, CNN-based methods perform image fusion by fusing local features. However, they do not consider long-range dependencies that are present in the image. Transformer-based models are designed to overcome this by modeling the long-range dependencies with the help of self-attention mechanism. This motivates us to propose a novel Image Fusion Transformer (IFT) where we develop a transformer-based multi-scale fusion strategy that attends to both local and long-range information (or global context). The proposed method follows a two-stage training approach. In the first stage, we train an auto-encoder to extract deep features at multiple scales. In the second stage, multi-scale features are fused using a Spatio-Transformer (ST) fusion strategy. The ST fusion blocks are comprised of a CNN and a transformer branch which capture local and long-range features, respectively. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets show that the proposed method performs better than many competitive fusion algorithms. Furthermore, we show the effectiveness of the proposed ST fusion strategy with an ablation analysis. The source code is available at: https://github.com/Vibashan/Image-Fusion-Transformer.
Hyperspectral pansharpening aims to synthesize a low-resolution hyperspectral image (LR-HSI) with a registered panchromatic image (PAN) to generate an enhanced HSI with high spectral and spatial resolution. Recently proposed HS pansharpening methods
have obtained remarkable results using deep convolutional networks (ConvNets), which typically consist of three steps: (1) up-sampling the LR-HSI, (2) predicting the residual image via a ConvNet, and (3) obtaining the final fused HSI by adding the outputs from first and second steps. Recent methods have leveraged Deep Image Prior (DIP) to up-sample the LR-HSI due to its excellent ability to preserve both spatial and spectral information, without learning from large data sets. However, we observed that the quality of up-sampled HSIs can be further improved by introducing an additional spatial-domain constraint to the conventional spectral-domain energy function. We define our spatial-domain constraint as the $L_1$ distance between the predicted PAN image and the actual PAN image. To estimate the PAN image of the up-sampled HSI, we also propose a learnable spectral response function (SRF). Moreover, we noticed that the residual image between the up-sampled HSI and the reference HSI mainly consists of edge information and very fine structures. In order to accurately estimate fine information, we propose a novel over-complete network, called HyperKite, which focuses on learning high-level features by constraining the receptive from increasing in the deep layers. We perform experiments on three HSI datasets to demonstrate the superiority of our DIP-HyperKite over the state-of-the-art pansharpening methods. The deployment codes, pre-trained models, and final fusion outputs of our DIP-HyperKite and the methods used for the comparisons will be publicly made available at https://github.com/wgcban/DIP-HyperKite.git.
Reconstructing magnetic resonance (MR) images from undersampled data is a challenging problem due to various artifacts introduced by the under-sampling operation. Recent deep learning-based methods for MR image reconstruction usually leverage a gener
ic auto-encoder architecture which captures low-level features at the initial layers and high-level features at the deeper layers. Such networks focus much on global features which may not be optimal to reconstruct the fully-sampled image. In this paper, we propose an Over-and-Under Complete Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (OUCR), which consists of an overcomplete and an undercomplete Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network(CRNN). The overcomplete branch gives special attention in learning local structures by restraining the receptive field of the network. Combining it with the undercomplete branch leads to a network which focuses more on low-level features without losing out on the global structures. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over the compressed sensing and popular deep learning-based methods with less number of trainable parameters.
Over the past decade, Deep Convolutional Neural Networks have been widely adopted for medical image segmentation and shown to achieve adequate performance. However, due to the inherent inductive biases present in the convolutional architectures, they
lack understanding of long-range dependencies in the image. Recently proposed Transformer-based architectures that leverage self-attention mechanism encode long-range dependencies and learn representations that are highly expressive. This motivates us to explore Transformer-based solutions and study the feasibility of using Transformer-based network architectures for medical image segmentation tasks. Majority of existing Transformer-based network architectures proposed for vision applications require large-scale datasets to train properly. However, compared to the datasets for vision applications, for medical imaging the number of data samples is relatively low, making it difficult to efficiently train transformers for medical applications. To this end, we propose a Gated Axial-Attention model which extends the existing architectures by introducing an additional control mechanism in the self-attention module. Furthermore, to train the model effectively on medical images, we propose a Local-Global training strategy (LoGo) which further improves the performance. Specifically, we operate on the whole image and patches to learn global and local features, respectively. The proposed Medical Transformer (MedT) is evaluated on three different medical image segmentation datasets and it is shown that it achieves better performance than the convolutional and other related transformer-based architectures. Code: https://github.com/jeya-maria-jose/Medical-Transformer
Adversarial robustness of deep neural networks is an extensively studied problem in the literature and various methods have been proposed to defend against adversarial images. However, only a handful of defense methods have been developed for defendi
ng against attacked videos. In this paper, we propose a novel Over-and-Under complete restoration network for Defending against adversarial videos (OUDefend). Most restoration networks adopt an encoder-decoder architecture that first shrinks spatial dimension then expands it back. This approach learns undercomplete representations, which have large receptive fields to collect global information but overlooks local details. On the other hand, overcomplete representations have opposite properties. Hence, OUDefend is designed to balance local and global features by learning those two representations. We attach OUDefend to target video recognition models as a feature restoration block and train the entire network end-to-end. Experimental results show that the defenses focusing on images may be ineffective to videos, while OUDefend enhances robustness against different types of adversarial videos, ranging from additive attacks, multiplicative attacks to physically realizable attacks. Code: https://github.com/shaoyuanlo/OUDefend
Deep Subspace Clustering Networks (DSC) provide an efficient solution to the problem of unsupervised subspace clustering by using an undercomplete deep auto-encoder with a fully-connected layer to exploit the self expressiveness property. This method
uses undercomplete representations of the input data which makes it not so robust and more dependent on pre-training. To overcome this, we propose a simple yet efficient alternative method - Overcomplete Deep Subspace Clustering Networks (ODSC) where we use overcomplete representations for subspace clustering. In our proposed method, we fuse the features from both undercomplete and overcomplete auto-encoder networks before passing them through the self-expressive layer thus enabling us to extract a more meaningful and robust representation of the input data for clustering. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method over DSC and other clustering methods in terms of clustering error. Our method is also not as dependent as DSC is on where pre-training should be stopped to get the best performance and is also more robust to noise. Code - href{https://github.com/jeya-maria-jose/Overcomplete-Deep-Subspace-Clustering}{https://github.com/jeya-maria-jose/Overcomplete-Deep-Subspace-Clustering
Removal of rain streaks from a single image is an extremely challenging problem since the rainy images often contain rain streaks of different size, shape, direction and density. Most recent methods for deraining use a deep network following a generi
c encoder-decoder architecture which captures low-level features across the initial layers and high-level features in the deeper layers. For the task of deraining, the rain streaks which are to be removed are relatively small and focusing much on global features is not an efficient way to solve the problem. To this end, we propose using an overcomplete convolutional network architecture which gives special attention in learning local structures by restraining the receptive field of filters. We combine it with U-Net so that it does not lose out on the global structures as well while focusing more on low-level features, to compute the derained image. The proposed network called, Over-and-Under Complete Deraining Network (OUCD), consists of two branches: overcomplete branch which is confined to small receptive field size in order to focus on the local structures and an undercomplete branch that has larger receptive fields to primarily focus on global structures. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over the recent state-of-the-art methods.
Most methods for medical image segmentation use U-Net or its variants as they have been successful in most of the applications. After a detailed analysis of these traditional encoder-decoder based approaches, we observed that they perform poorly in d
etecting smaller structures and are unable to segment boundary regions precisely. This issue can be attributed to the increase in receptive field size as we go deeper into the encoder. The extra focus on learning high level features causes the U-Net based approaches to learn less information about low-level features which are crucial for detecting small structures. To overcome this issue, we propose using an overcomplete convolutional architecture where we project our input image into a higher dimension such that we constrain the receptive field from increasing in the deep layers of the network. We design a new architecture for image segmentation- KiU-Net which has two branches: (1) an overcomplete convolutional network Kite-Net which learns to capture fine details and accurate edges of the input, and (2) U-Net which learns high level features. Furthermore, we also propose KiU-Net 3D which is a 3D convolutional architecture for volumetric segmentation. We perform a detailed study of KiU-Net by performing experiments on five different datasets covering various image modalities like ultrasound (US), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), microscopic and fundus images. The proposed method achieves a better performance as compared to all the recent methods with an additional benefit of fewer parameters and faster convergence. Additionally, we also demonstrate that the extensions of KiU-Net based on residual blocks and dense blocks result in further performance improvements. The implementation of KiU-Net can be found here: https://github.com/jeya-maria-jose/KiU-Net-pytorch
