Xian Sun

Yuelei Wang, Ting Zhang, Liangjin Zhao et al.

In recent years, remote sensing (RS) vision foundation models such as RingMo have emerged and achieved excellent performance in various downstream tasks. However, the high demand for computing resources limits the application of these models on edge devices. It is necessary to design a more lightweight foundation model to support on-orbit RS image interpretation. Existing methods face challenges in achieving lightweight solutions while retaining generalization in RS image interpretation. This is due to the complex high and low-frequency spectral components in RS images, which make traditional single CNN or Vision Transformer methods unsuitable for the task. Therefore, this paper proposes RingMo-lite, an RS multi-task lightweight network with a CNN-Transformer hybrid framework, which effectively exploits the frequency-domain properties of RS to optimize the interpretation process. It is combined by the Transformer module as a low-pass filter to extract global features of RS images through a dual-branch structure, and the CNN module as a stacked high-pass filter to extract fine-grained details effectively. Furthermore, in the pretraining stage, the designed frequency-domain masked image modeling (FD-MIM) combines each image patch's high-frequency and low-frequency characteristics, effectively capturing the latent feature representation in RS data. As shown in Fig. 1, compared with RingMo, the proposed RingMo-lite reduces the parameters over 60% in various RS image interpretation tasks, the average accuracy drops by less than 2% in most of the scenes and achieves SOTA performance compared to models of the similar size. In addition, our work will be integrated into the MindSpore computing platform in the near future.

Zhechao Wang, Peirui Cheng, Mingxin Chen et al.

Collaborative trajectory prediction can comprehensively forecast the future motion of objects through multi-view complementary information. However, it encounters two main challenges in multi-drone collaboration settings. The expansive aerial observations make it difficult to generate precise Bird's Eye View (BEV) representations. Besides, excessive interactions can not meet real-time prediction requirements within the constrained drone-based communication bandwidth. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework named "Drones Help Drones" (DHD). Firstly, we incorporate the ground priors provided by the drone's inclined observation to estimate the distance between objects and drones, leading to more precise BEV generation. Secondly, we design a selective mechanism based on the local feature discrepancy to prioritize the critical information contributing to prediction tasks during inter-drone interactions. Additionally, we create the first dataset for multi-drone collaborative prediction, named "Air-Co-Pred", and conduct quantitative and qualitative experiments to validate the effectiveness of our DHD framework.The results demonstrate that compared to state-of-the-art approaches, DHD reduces position deviation in BEV representations by over 20% and requires only a quarter of the transmission ratio for interactions while achieving comparable prediction performance. Moreover, DHD also shows promising generalization to the collaborative 3D object detection in CoPerception-UAVs.

Liangyu Xu, Wanxuan Lu, Hongfeng Yu et al.

As drone technology advances, using unmanned aerial vehicles for aerial surveys has become the dominant trend in modern low-altitude remote sensing. The surge in aerial video data necessitates accurate prediction for future scenarios and motion states of the interested target, particularly in applications like traffic management and disaster response. Existing video prediction methods focus solely on predicting future scenes (video frames), suffering from the neglect of explicitly modeling target's motion states, which is crucial for aerial video interpretation. To address this issue, we introduce a novel task called Target-Aware Aerial Video Prediction, aiming to simultaneously predict future scenes and motion states of the target. Further, we design a model specifically for this task, named TAFormer, which provides a unified modeling approach for both video and target motion states. Specifically, we introduce Spatiotemporal Attention (STA), which decouples the learning of video dynamics into spatial static attention and temporal dynamic attention, effectively modeling the scene appearance and motion. Additionally, we design an Information Sharing Mechanism (ISM), which elegantly unifies the modeling of video and target motion by facilitating information interaction through two sets of messenger tokens. Moreover, to alleviate the difficulty of distinguishing targets in blurry predictions, we introduce Target-Sensitive Gaussian Loss (TSGL), enhancing the model's sensitivity to both target's position and content. Extensive experiments on UAV123VP and VisDroneVP (derived from single-object tracking datasets) demonstrate the exceptional performance of TAFormer in target-aware video prediction, showcasing its adaptability to the additional requirements of aerial video interpretation for target awareness.

Pengju Tian, Peirui Cheng, Yuchao Wang et al.

Multi-UAV collaborative 3D object detection can perceive and comprehend complex environments by integrating complementary information, with applications encompassing traffic monitoring, delivery services and agricultural management. However, the extremely broad observations in aerial remote sensing and significant perspective differences across multiple UAVs make it challenging to achieve precise and consistent feature mapping from 2D images to 3D space in multi-UAV collaborative 3D object detection paradigm. To address the problem, we propose an unparalleled camera-based multi-UAV collaborative 3D object detection paradigm called UCDNet. Specifically, the depth information from the UAVs to the ground is explicitly utilized as a strong prior to provide a reference for more accurate and generalizable feature mapping. Additionally, we design a homologous points geometric consistency loss as an auxiliary self-supervision, which directly influences the feature mapping module, thereby strengthening the global consistency of multi-view perception. Experiments on AeroCollab3D and CoPerception-UAVs datasets show our method increases 4.7% and 10% mAP respectively compared to the baseline, which demonstrates the superiority of UCDNet.

Yuchao Wang, Peirui Cheng, Pengju Tian et al.

With the advancement of collaborative perception, the role of aerial-ground collaborative perception, a crucial component, is becoming increasingly important. The demand for collaborative perception across different perspectives to construct more comprehensive perceptual information is growing. However, challenges arise due to the disparities in the field of view between cross-domain agents and their varying sensitivity to information in images. Additionally, when we transform image features into Bird's Eye View (BEV) features for collaboration, we need accurate depth information. To address these issues, we propose a framework specifically designed for aerial-ground collaboration. First, to mitigate the lack of datasets for aerial-ground collaboration, we develop a virtual dataset named V2U-COO for our research. Second, we design a Cross-Domain Cross-Adaptation (CDCA) module to align the target information obtained from different domains, thereby achieving more accurate perception results. Finally, we introduce a Collaborative Depth Optimization (CDO) module to obtain more precise depth estimation results, leading to more accurate perception outcomes. We conduct extensive experiments on both our virtual dataset and a public dataset to validate the effectiveness of our framework. Our experiments on the V2U-COO dataset and the DAIR-V2X dataset demonstrate that our method improves detection accuracy by 6.1% and 2.7%, respectively.

Jian Peng, Xian Sun, Min Deng et al.

Remembering and forgetting mechanisms are two sides of the same coin in a human learning-memory system. Inspired by human brain memory mechanisms, modern machine learning systems have been working to endow machine with lifelong learning capability through better remembering while pushing the forgetting as the antagonist to overcome. Nevertheless, this idea might only see the half picture. Up until very recently, increasing researchers argue that a brain is born to forget, i.e., forgetting is a natural and active process for abstract, rich, and flexible representations. This paper presents a learning model by active forgetting mechanism with artificial neural networks. The active forgetting mechanism (AFM) is introduced to a neural network via a "plug-and-play" forgetting layer (P\&PF), consisting of groups of inhibitory neurons with Internal Regulation Strategy (IRS) to adjust the extinction rate of themselves via lateral inhibition mechanism and External Regulation Strategy (ERS) to adjust the extinction rate of excitatory neurons via inhibition mechanism. Experimental studies have shown that the P\&PF offers surprising benefits: self-adaptive structure, strong generalization, long-term learning and memory, and robustness to data and parameter perturbation. This work sheds light on the importance of forgetting in the learning process and offers new perspectives to understand the underlying mechanisms of neural networks.

Yanan Sun, Xian Sun, Yuhan Fang et al.

Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search (ENAS) can automatically design the architectures of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) using evolutionary computation algorithms. However, most ENAS algorithms require intensive computational resource, which is not necessarily available to the users interested. Performance predictors are a type of regression models which can assist to accomplish the search, while without exerting much computational resource. Despite various performance predictors have been designed, they employ the same training protocol to build the regression models: 1) sampling a set of DNNs with performance as the training dataset, 2) training the model with the mean square error criterion, and 3) predicting the performance of DNNs newly generated during the ENAS. In this paper, we point out that the three steps constituting the training protocol are not well though-out through intuitive and illustrative examples. Furthermore, we propose a new training protocol to address these issues, consisting of designing a pairwise ranking indicator to construct the training target, proposing to use the logistic regression to fit the training samples, and developing a differential method to building the training instances. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed training protocol, four widely used regression models in the field of machine learning have been chosen to perform the comparisons on two benchmark datasets. The experimental results of all the comparisons demonstrate that the proposed training protocol can significantly improve the performance prediction accuracy against the traditional training protocols.

Tengfei Zhang, Yue Zhang, Xian Sun et al.

The current advances in object detection depend on large-scale datasets to get good performance. However, there may not always be sufficient samples in many scenarios, which leads to the research on few-shot detection as well as its extreme variation one-shot detection. In this paper, the one-shot detection has been formulated as a conditional probability problem. With this insight, a novel one-shot conditional object detection (OSCD) framework, referred as Comparison Network (ComparisonNet), has been proposed. Specifically, query and target image features are extracted through a Siamese network as mapped metrics of marginal probabilities. A two-stage detector for OSCD is introduced to compare the extracted query and target features with the learnable metric to approach the optimized non-linear conditional probability. Once trained, ComparisonNet can detect objects of both seen and unseen classes without further training, which also has the advantages including class-agnostic, training-free for unseen classes, and without catastrophic forgetting. Experiments show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the proposed datasets of Fashion-MNIST and PASCAL VOC.

Xue Yang, Jirui Yang, Junchi Yan et al.

Object detection has been a building block in computer vision. Though considerable progress has been made, there still exist challenges for objects with small size, arbitrary direction, and dense distribution. Apart from natural images, such issues are especially pronounced for aerial images of great importance. This paper presents a novel multi-category rotation detector for small, cluttered and rotated objects, namely SCRDet. Specifically, a sampling fusion network is devised which fuses multi-layer feature with effective anchor sampling, to improve the sensitivity to small objects. Meanwhile, the supervised pixel attention network and the channel attention network are jointly explored for small and cluttered object detection by suppressing the noise and highlighting the objects feature. For more accurate rotation estimation, the IoU constant factor is added to the smooth L1 loss to address the boundary problem for the rotating bounding box. Extensive experiments on two remote sensing public datasets DOTA, NWPU VHR-10 as well as natural image datasets COCO, VOC2007 and scene text data ICDAR2015 show the state-of-the-art performance of our detector. The code and models will be available at https://github.com/DetectionTeamUCAS.