Paired regions for shadow removal approach based on multi-features

The existence of shadow leads to the degradation of the image qualities and the defect of ground object information.Shadow removal is therefore an essential research topic in image processing filed.The biggest challenge of shadow removal is how to restore the content of shadow areas correctly while removing the shadow in the image.Paired regions for shadow removal approach based on multi-features is proposed, in which shadow removal is only performed on related sunlit areas.Feature distance between regions is calculated to find the optimal paired regions with considering of multi-features(texture, gradient feature, etc.) comprehensively.Images in different scenes with peak signal-to-noise ratio(PSNR) and structural similarity(SSIM) evaluation indexes are chosen for experiments.The results are shown with six existing comparison methods by visual and quantitative assessments, which verified that the proposed method shows excellent shadow removal effect, the brightness, color of the removed shadow area, and the surrounding non-shadow area can be naturally fused.

SAR image despeckling via Lp norm regularization

Synthetic aperture radar(SAR) image despeckling has been an attractive problem in remote sensing.The main challenge is to suppress speckle while preserving edges and preventing unnatural artifacts(such as annoying artifacts in homogeneous regions and over-smoothed edges).To address these problems,this paper proposes a new variational model with a nonconvex nonsmooth Lp(0 <p<1) norm regularization.It incorporates Lp(0<p<1) norm regularization and I-divergence fidelity term.Due to the nonconvex nonsmooth property,the regularization can better recover neat edges and homogeneous regions.The Ⅰ-divergence fidelity term is used to suppress the multiplicative noise effectively.Moreover,based on variable-splitting and alternating direction method of multipliers(ADMM) method,an efficient algorithm is proposed for solving this model.Intensive experimental results demonstrate that nonconvex nonsmooth model is superior to other state-of-the-art approaches qualitatively and quantitatively.

A fully automatic and high-accuracy surface water mapping framework on Google Earth Engine using Landsat time-series

Efficient and continuous monitoring of surface water is essential for water resource management.Much effort has been devoted to the task of water mapping based on remote sensing images.However,few studies have fully considered the diverse spectral properties of water for the collection of reference samples in an automatic manner.Moreover,water area statistics are sensitive to the satellite image observation quality.This study aims to develop a fully automatic surface water mapping framework based on Google Earth Engine(GEE)with a supervised random forest classifier.A robust scheme was built to automatically construct training samples by merging the information from multi-source water occurrence products.The samples for permanent and seasonal water were mapped and collected separately,so that the supplement of seasonal samples can increase the spectral diversity of the sample space.To reduce the uncertainty of the derived water occurrences,temporal correction was applied to repair the classification maps with invalid observations.Extensive experiments showed that the proposed method can generate reliable samples and produce good-quality water mapping results.Comparative tests indicated that the proposed method produced water maps with a higher quality than the index-based detection methods,as well as the GSWD and GLAD datasets.

Knowledge Graph for Identifying Geological Disasters by Integrating Computer Vision with Ontology

The occurrence of geological disasters can have a large impact on urban safety. Protecting people’s safety is the most important concern when disasters occur. Safety improvement requires a large amount of comprehensive and representative risk analysis and a large collection of information related to geological hazards, including unstructured knowledge and experience. To address the relevant information and support safety risk analysis, a geological hazard knowledge graph is developed automatically based on computer vision and domain-geoscience ontology to identify geological hazards from input images while obeying safety rules and regulations, even when affected by changes. In the implementation of the knowledge graph, we design an ontology schema of geological disasters based on a top-down approach, and by organizing knowledge as a logical semantic expression, it can be shared using ontology technologies and therefore enable semantic interoperability. Computer vision approaches are then used to automatically detect a set of entities and attributes, using the data from input images, and object types and their attributes are identified so that they can be stored in Neo4j for reasoning and searching. Finally, a reasoning model for geological hazard identification was developed using the Neo4j database to create nodes, relationships, and their properties for modeling, and geological hazards in the images can be automatically identified by searching the Neo4j database. An application on geological hazard is presented. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of identifying possible potential hazards in geological hazards and assisting in formulating targeted preventive measures.

MDC-Net:a multi-directional constrained and prior assisted neural network for wood and leaf separation from terrestrial laser scanning

Wood-leaf separation from terrestrial laser scanning(TLS)is a crucial prerequisite for quantifying many biophysical properties and understanding ecological functions.In this study,we propose a novel multi-directional collaborative convolutional neural network(MDC-Net)that takes the original 3D coordinates and useful features from prior knowledge(prior features)as input,and outputs the semantic labels of TLS point clouds.The MDC-Net contains two key units:(1)a multi-directional neighborhood construction(MDNC)unit to obtain more representative neighbors and enable directionally aware feature encoding in the subsequent local feature extraction,to mitigate occlusion effects;(2)a collaborative feature encoding(CFE)unit is introduced to incorporate useful features from prior knowledge into the network through a collaborative cross coding to enhance the discrimination for thin structures(e.g.small branches and leaf).The MDC-Net is evaluated onfive plots from forests in Guangxi,China,with different branch architectures and leaf distributions.Experimental results showed that the MDC-Net achieved an OA of 0.973 and a mIoU of 0.821 and outperformed other related methods.We believe the MDC-Net would facilitate the usage of TLS in ecology studies for quantifying tree size and morphology and thus promote the development of relevant ecological applications.

CW-YOLO: joint learning for mask wearing detection in low-light conditions

1 Introduction With the rapid progress of Artificial Intelligence(AI)technology in object detection and face recognition,deep learning methods for face mask wearing detection have become increasingly mature and continuously take into account the needs of efficiency and accuracy.However,these conventional detection methods mostly ignore the complexity of real-world application scenarios,such as extremely darkness and gloomy weather.These unfavorable conditions lead to a series of image degradations that seriously hamper machine vision tasks.Although camera parameter adjustment,auxiliary lighting,or pre-processing enhancement[1]can weaken these negative effects to some extent to promote the detection,they will also result in increased hardware and time costs.

Region-aware neural graph collaborative filtering for personalized recommendation

Personalized recommender systems have been widely deployed in various scenarios to enhance user experience in response to the challenge of information explosion.Especially,personalized recommendation models based on graph structure have advanced greatly in predicting user preferences.However,geographical region entities that reflect the geographical context of the items is not being utilized in previous works,leaving room for the improvement of personalized recommendation.This study proposes a region-aware neural graph collaborative filtering(RA-NGCF)model,which introduces the geographical regions for improving the prediction of user preference.The approach first characterizes the relationships between items and users with a user-item-region graph.And,a neural network model for the region-aware graph is derived to capture the higher-order interaction among users,items,and regions.Finally,the model fuses region and item vectors to infer user preferences.Experiments on real-world dataset results show that introducing region entities improves the accuracy of personalized recommendations.This study provides a new approach for optimizing personalized recommendation as well as a methodological reference for facilitating geographical regions for optimizing spatial applications.