scholarly journals CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF OBJECT SEGMENTATION IN AERIAL IMAGE USING GEO-HAUSDORFF DISTANCE

Author(s):  
H. Sun ◽  
Y. Ding ◽  
Y. Huang ◽  
G. Wang

Aerial Image records the large-range earth objects with the ever-improving spatial and radiometric resolution. It becomes a powerful tool for earth observation, land-coverage survey, geographical census, etc., and helps delineating the boundary of different kinds of objects on the earth both manually and automatically. In light of the geo-spatial correspondence between the pixel locations of aerial image and the spatial coordinates of ground objects, there is an increasing need of super-pixel segmentation and high-accuracy positioning of objects in aerial image. Besides the commercial software package of eCognition and ENVI, many algorithms have also been developed in the literature to segment objects of aerial images. But how to evaluate the segmentation results remains a challenge, especially in the context of the geo-spatial correspondence. The Geo-Hausdorff Distance (GHD) is proposed to measure the geo-spatial distance between the results of various object segmentation that can be done with the manual ground truth or with the automatic algorithms.Based on the early-breaking and random-sampling design, the GHD calculates the geographical Hausdorff distance with nearly-linear complexity. Segmentation results of several state-of-the-art algorithms, including those of the commercial packages, are evaluated with a diverse set of aerial images. They have different signal-to-noise ratio around the object boundaries and are hard to trace correctly even for human operators. The GHD value is analyzed to comprehensively measure the suitability of different object segmentation methods for aerial images of different spatial resolution. By critically assessing the strengths and limitations of the existing algorithms, the paper provides valuable insight and guideline for extensive research in automating object detection and classification of aerial image in the nation-wide geographic census. It is also promising for the optimal design of operational specification of remote sensing interpretation under the constraints of limited resource.

Author(s):  
H. Sun ◽  
Y. Ding ◽  
Y. Huang ◽  
G. Wang

Aerial Image records the large-range earth objects with the ever-improving spatial and radiometric resolution. It becomes a powerful tool for earth observation, land-coverage survey, geographical census, etc., and helps delineating the boundary of different kinds of objects on the earth both manually and automatically. In light of the geo-spatial correspondence between the pixel locations of aerial image and the spatial coordinates of ground objects, there is an increasing need of super-pixel segmentation and high-accuracy positioning of objects in aerial image. Besides the commercial software package of eCognition and ENVI, many algorithms have also been developed in the literature to segment objects of aerial images. But how to evaluate the segmentation results remains a challenge, especially in the context of the geo-spatial correspondence. The Geo-Hausdorff Distance (GHD) is proposed to measure the geo-spatial distance between the results of various object segmentation that can be done with the manual ground truth or with the automatic algorithms.Based on the early-breaking and random-sampling design, the GHD calculates the geographical Hausdorff distance with nearly-linear complexity. Segmentation results of several state-of-the-art algorithms, including those of the commercial packages, are evaluated with a diverse set of aerial images. They have different signal-to-noise ratio around the object boundaries and are hard to trace correctly even for human operators. The GHD value is analyzed to comprehensively measure the suitability of different object segmentation methods for aerial images of different spatial resolution. By critically assessing the strengths and limitations of the existing algorithms, the paper provides valuable insight and guideline for extensive research in automating object detection and classification of aerial image in the nation-wide geographic census. It is also promising for the optimal design of operational specification of remote sensing interpretation under the constraints of limited resource.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 1157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Fuentes-Pacheco ◽  
Juan Torres-Olivares ◽  
Edgar Roman-Rangel ◽  
Salvador Cervantes ◽  
Porfirio Juarez-Lopez ◽  
...  

Crop segmentation is an important task in Precision Agriculture, where the use of aerial robots with an on-board camera has contributed to the development of new solution alternatives. We address the problem of fig plant segmentation in top-view RGB (Red-Green-Blue) images of a crop grown under open-field difficult circumstances of complex lighting conditions and non-ideal crop maintenance practices defined by local farmers. We present a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with an encoder-decoder architecture that classifies each pixel as crop or non-crop using only raw colour images as input. Our approach achieves a mean accuracy of 93.85% despite the complexity of the background and a highly variable visual appearance of the leaves. We make available our CNN code to the research community, as well as the aerial image data set and a hand-made ground truth segmentation with pixel precision to facilitate the comparison among different algorithms.


Author(s):  
T. Koch ◽  
X. Zhuo ◽  
P. Reinartz ◽  
F. Fraundorfer

This paper investigates the performance of SIFT-based image matching regarding large differences in image scaling and rotation, as this is usually the case when trying to match images captured from UAVs and airplanes. This task represents an essential step for image registration and 3d-reconstruction applications. Various real world examples presented in this paper show that SIFT, as well as A-SIFT perform poorly or even fail in this matching scenario. Even if the scale difference in the images is known and eliminated beforehand, the matching performance suffers from too few feature point detections, ambiguous feature point orientations and rejection of many correct matches when applying the ratio-test afterwards. Therefore, a new feature matching method is provided that overcomes these problems and offers thousands of matches by a novel feature point detection strategy, applying a one-to-many matching scheme and substitute the ratio-test by adding geometric constraints to achieve geometric correct matches at repetitive image regions. This method is designed for matching almost nadir-directed images with low scene depth, as this is typical in UAV and aerial image matching scenarios. We tested the proposed method on different real world image pairs. While standard SIFT failed for most of the datasets, plenty of geometrical correct matches could be found using our approach. Comparing the estimated fundamental matrices and homographies with ground-truth solutions, mean errors of few pixels can be achieved.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiaming Han ◽  
Zhong Yang ◽  
Qiuyan Zhang ◽  
Cong Chen ◽  
Hongchen Li ◽  
...  

Insulator faults detection is an important task for high-voltage transmission line inspection. However, current methods often suffer from the lack of accuracy and robustness. Moreover, these methods can only detect one fault in the insulator string, but cannot detect a multi-fault. In this paper, a novel method is proposed for insulator one fault and multi-fault detection in UAV-based aerial images, the backgrounds of which usually contain much complex interference. The shapes of the insulators also vary obviously due to the changes in filming angle and distance. To reduce the impact of complex interference on insulator faults detection, we make full use of the deep neural network to distinguish between insulators and background interference. First of all, plenty of insulator aerial images with manually labelled ground-truth are collected to construct a standard insulator detection dataset ‘InST_detection’. Secondly, a new convolutional network is proposed to obtain accurate insulator string positions in the aerial image. Finally, a novel fault detection method is proposed that can detect both insulator one fault and multi-fault in aerial images. Experimental results on a large number of aerial images show that our proposed method is more effective and efficient than the state-of-the-art insulator fault detection methods.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Zhifeng Xiao ◽  
Kai Wang ◽  
Qiao Wan ◽  
Xiaowei Tan ◽  
Chuan Xu ◽  
...  

Object detection is a challenging task in aerial images, where many objects have large aspect ratios and are densely arranged. Most anchor-based rotating detectors assign anchors for ground-truth objects by a fixed restriction of the rotation Intersection-over-Unit (IoU) between anchors and objects, which directly follow horizontal detectors. Due to many directional objects with a large aspect ratio, the object-anchor IoU is heavily influenced by the angle, which may cause few anchors assigned for some ground-truth objects. In this study, we propose an anchor selection method based on sample balance assigning anchors adaptively, which we name the Self-Adaptive Anchor Selection (A2S-Det) method. For each ground-truth object, A2S-Det selects a set of candidate anchors by horizontal IoU. Then, an adaptive threshold module is adopted on the set of candidate anchors, which calculates a boundary of these candidate anchors aiming to keep a balance between positive and negative anchors. In addition, we propose a coordinate regression of relative reference (CR3) module to precisely regress the rotating bounding box. We test our method on a public aerial image dataset, and prove better performance than many other one-stage detectors and two-stage detectors, achieving the mAP of 70.64. An efficiency anchor matching method helps the detector achieve better performance for objects with large aspect ratios.


Author(s):  
T. Koch ◽  
X. Zhuo ◽  
P. Reinartz ◽  
F. Fraundorfer

This paper investigates the performance of SIFT-based image matching regarding large differences in image scaling and rotation, as this is usually the case when trying to match images captured from UAVs and airplanes. This task represents an essential step for image registration and 3d-reconstruction applications. Various real world examples presented in this paper show that SIFT, as well as A-SIFT perform poorly or even fail in this matching scenario. Even if the scale difference in the images is known and eliminated beforehand, the matching performance suffers from too few feature point detections, ambiguous feature point orientations and rejection of many correct matches when applying the ratio-test afterwards. Therefore, a new feature matching method is provided that overcomes these problems and offers thousands of matches by a novel feature point detection strategy, applying a one-to-many matching scheme and substitute the ratio-test by adding geometric constraints to achieve geometric correct matches at repetitive image regions. This method is designed for matching almost nadir-directed images with low scene depth, as this is typical in UAV and aerial image matching scenarios. We tested the proposed method on different real world image pairs. While standard SIFT failed for most of the datasets, plenty of geometrical correct matches could be found using our approach. Comparing the estimated fundamental matrices and homographies with ground-truth solutions, mean errors of few pixels can be achieved.


Author(s):  
S. N. K. Amit ◽  
S. Saito ◽  
S. Sasaki ◽  
Y. Kiyoki ◽  
Y. Aoki

Google earth with high-resolution imagery basically takes months to process new images before online updates. It is a time consuming and slow process especially for post-disaster application. The objective of this research is to develop a fast and effective method of updating maps by detecting local differences occurred over different time series; where only region with differences will be updated. In our system, aerial images from Massachusetts’s road and building open datasets, Saitama district datasets are used as input images. Semantic segmentation is then applied to input images. Semantic segmentation is a pixel-wise classification of images by implementing deep neural network technique. Deep neural network technique is implemented due to being not only efficient in learning highly discriminative image features such as road, buildings etc., but also partially robust to incomplete and poorly registered target maps. Then, aerial images which contain semantic information are stored as database in 5D world map is set as ground truth images. This system is developed to visualise multimedia data in 5 dimensions; 3 dimensions as spatial dimensions, 1 dimension as temporal dimension, and 1 dimension as degenerated dimensions of semantic and colour combination dimension. Next, ground truth images chosen from database in 5D world map and a new aerial image with same spatial information but different time series are compared via difference extraction method. The map will only update where local changes had occurred. Hence, map updating will be cheaper, faster and more effective especially post-disaster application, by leaving unchanged region and only update changed region.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 2656
Author(s):  
Furong Shi ◽  
Tong Zhang

Deep-learning technologies, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have achieved great success in building extraction from areal images. However, shape details are often lost during the down-sampling process, which results in discontinuous segmentation or inaccurate segmentation boundary. In order to compensate for the loss of shape information, two shape-related auxiliary tasks (i.e., boundary prediction and distance estimation) were jointly learned with building segmentation task in our proposed network. Meanwhile, two consistency constraint losses were designed based on the multi-task network to exploit the duality between the mask prediction and two shape-related information predictions. Specifically, an atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module was appended to the top of the encoder of a U-shaped network to obtain multi-scale features. Based on the multi-scale features, one regression loss and two classification losses were used for predicting the distance-transform map, segmentation, and boundary. Two inter-task consistency-loss functions were constructed to ensure the consistency between distance maps and masks, and the consistency between masks and boundary maps. Experimental results on three public aerial image data sets showed that our method achieved superior performance over the recent state-of-the-art models.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Orhun Utku Aydin ◽  
Abdel Aziz Taha ◽  
Adam Hilbert ◽  
Ahmed A. Khalil ◽  
Ivana Galinovic ◽  
...  

AbstractAverage Hausdorff distance is a widely used performance measure to calculate the distance between two point sets. In medical image segmentation, it is used to compare ground truth images with segmentations allowing their ranking. We identified, however, ranking errors of average Hausdorff distance making it less suitable for applications in segmentation performance assessment. To mitigate this error, we present a modified calculation of this performance measure that we have coined “balanced average Hausdorff distance”. To simulate segmentations for ranking, we manually created non-overlapping segmentation errors common in magnetic resonance angiography cerebral vessel segmentation as our use-case. Adding the created errors consecutively and randomly to the ground truth, we created sets of simulated segmentations with increasing number of errors. Each set of simulated segmentations was ranked using both performance measures. We calculated the Kendall rank correlation coefficient between the segmentation ranking and the number of errors in each simulated segmentation. The rankings produced by balanced average Hausdorff distance had a significantly higher median correlation (1.00) than those by average Hausdorff distance (0.89). In 200 total rankings, the former misranked 52 whilst the latter misranked 179 segmentations. Balanced average Hausdorff distance is more suitable for rankings and quality assessment of segmentations than average Hausdorff distance.


Author(s):  
Linying Zhou ◽  
Zhou Zhou ◽  
Hang Ning

Road detection from aerial images still is a challenging task since it is heavily influenced by spectral reflectance, shadows and occlusions. In order to increase the road detection accuracy, a proposed method for road detection by GAC model with edge feature extraction and segmentation is studied in this paper. First, edge feature can be extracted using the proposed gradient magnitude with Canny operator. Then, a reconstructed gradient map is applied in watershed transformation method, which is segmented for the next initial contour. Last, with the combination of edge feature and initial contour, the boundary stopping function is applied in the GAC model. The road boundary result can be accomplished finally. Experimental results show, by comparing with other methods in [Formula: see text]-measure system, that the proposed method can achieve satisfying results.


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