Huanfeng Shen

Yinghong Jing, Liupeng Lin, Xinghua Li et al.

Precipitation is a key part of hydrological circulation and is a sensitive indicator of climate change. The Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission (IMERG) datasets are widely used for global and regional precipitation investigations. However, their local application is limited by the relatively coarse spatial resolution. Therefore, in this paper, an attention mechanism based convolutional network (AMCN) is proposed to downscale GPM IMERG monthly precipitation data. The proposed method is an end-to-end network, which consists of a global cross-attention module, a multi-factor cross-attention module, and a residual convolutional module, comprehensively considering the potential relationships between precipitation and complicated surface characteristics. In addition, a degradation loss function based on low-resolution precipitation is designed to physically constrain the network training, to improve the robustness of the proposed network under different time and scale variations. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed network significantly outperforms three baseline methods. Finally, a geographic difference analysis method is introduced to further improve the downscaled results by incorporating in-situ measurements for high-quality and fine-scale precipitation estimation.

Jun Ma, Huanfeng Shen, Menghui Jiang et al.

More accurate, spatio-temporally, and physically consistent LST estimation has been a main interest in Earth system research. Developing physics-driven mechanism models and data-driven machine learning (ML) models are two major paradigms for gapless LST estimation, which have their respective advantages and disadvantages. In this paper, a physics-constrained ML model, which combines the strengths in the mechanism model and ML model, is proposed to generate gapless LST with physical meanings and high accuracy. The hybrid model employs ML as the primary architecture, under which the input variable physical constraints are incorporated to enhance the interpretability and extrapolation ability of the model. Specifically, the light gradient-boosting machine (LGBM) model, which uses only remote sensing data as input, serves as the pure ML model. Physical constraints (PCs) are coupled by further incorporating key Community Land Model (CLM) forcing data (cause) and CLM simulation data (effect) as inputs into the LGBM model. This integration forms the PC-LGBM model, which incorporates surface energy balance (SEB) constraints underlying the data in CLM-LST modeling within a biophysical framework. Compared with a pure physical method and pure ML methods, the PC-LGBM model improves the prediction accuracy and physical interpretability of LST. It also demonstrates a good extrapolation ability for the responses to extreme weather cases, suggesting that the PC-LGBM model enables not only empirical learning from data but also rationally derived from theory. The proposed method represents an innovative way to map accurate and physically interpretable gapless LST, and could provide insights to accelerate knowledge discovery in land surface processes and data mining in geographical parameter estimation.

Liying Xu, Huifang Li, Huanfeng Shen et al.

Data quantity and quality are both critical for information extraction and analyzation in remote sensing. However, the current remote sensing datasets often fail to meet these two requirements, for which cloud is a primary factor degrading the data quantity and quality. This limitation affects the precision of results in remote sensing application, particularly those derived from data-driven techniques. In this paper, a physical law embedded generative cloud synthesis method (PGCS) is proposed to generate diverse realistic cloud images to enhance real data and promote the development of algorithms for subsequent tasks, such as cloud correction, cloud detection, and data augmentation for classification, recognition, and segmentation. The PGCS method involves two key phases: spatial synthesis and spectral synthesis. In the spatial synthesis phase, a style-based generative adversarial network is utilized to simulate the spatial characteristics, generating an infinite number of single-channel clouds. In the spectral synthesis phase, the atmospheric scattering law is embedded through a local statistics and global fitting method, converting the single-channel clouds into multi-spectral clouds. The experimental results demonstrate that PGCS achieves a high accuracy in both phases and performs better than three other existing cloud synthesis methods. Two cloud correction methods are developed from PGCS and exhibits a superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in the cloud correction task. Furthermore, the application of PGCS with data from various sensors was investigated and successfully extended. Code will be provided at https://github.com/Liying-Xu/PGCS.

Jing Sun, Qiangqiang Yuan, Huanfeng Shen et al.

The objective of image super-resolution is to reconstruct a high-resolution (HR) image with the prior knowledge from one or several low-resolution (LR) images. However, in the real world, due to the limited complementary information, the performance of both single-frame and multi-frame super-resolution reconstruction degrades rapidly as the magnification increases. In this paper, we propose a novel two-step image super resolution method concatenating multi-frame super-resolution (MFSR) with single-frame super-resolution (SFSR), to progressively upsample images to the desired resolution. The proposed method consisting of an L0-norm constrained reconstruction scheme and an enhanced residual back-projection network, integrating the flexibility of the variational modelbased method and the feature learning capacity of the deep learning-based method. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, extensive experiments with both simulated and real world sequences were implemented. The experimental results show that the proposed method yields superior performance in both objective and perceptual quality measurements. The average PSNRs of the cascade model in set5 and set14 are 33.413 dB and 29.658 dB respectively, which are 0.76 dB and 0.621 dB more than the baseline method. In addition, the experiment indicates that this cascade model can be robustly applied to different SFSR and MFSR methods.

Jing Sun, Huanfeng Shen, Qiangqiang Yuan et al.

Image super-resolution (SR) is an effective way to enhance the spatial resolution and detail information of remote sensing images, to obtain a superior visual quality. As SR is severely ill-conditioned, effective image priors are necessary to regularize the solution space and generate the corresponding high-resolution (HR) image. In this paper, we propose a novel gradient-guided multi-frame super-resolution (MFSR) framework for remote sensing imagery reconstruction. The framework integrates a learned gradient prior as the regularization term into a model-based optimization method. Specifically, the local gradient regularization (LGR) prior is derived from the deep residual attention network (DRAN) through gradient profile transformation. The non-local total variation (NLTV) prior is characterized using the spatial structure similarity of the gradient patches with the maximum a posteriori (MAP) model. The modeled prior performs well in preserving edge smoothness and suppressing visual artifacts, while the learned prior is effective in enhancing sharp edges and recovering fine structures. By incorporating the two complementary priors into an adaptive norm based reconstruction framework, the mixed L1 and L2 regularization minimization problem is optimized to achieve the required HR remote sensing image. Extensive experimental results on remote sensing data demonstrate that the proposed method can produce visually pleasant images and is superior to several of the state-of-the-art SR algorithms in terms of the quantitative evaluation.

Tian Xie, Menghui Jiang, Huanfeng Shen et al.

Land surface temperature (LST) retrieval from remote sensing data is pivotal for analyzing climate processes and surface energy budgets. However, LST retrieval is an ill-posed inverse problem, which becomes particularly severe when only a single band is available. In this paper, we propose a deeply coupled framework integrating mechanistic modeling and machine learning to enhance the accuracy and generalizability of single-channel LST retrieval. Training samples are generated using a physically-based radiative transfer model and a global collection of 5810 atmospheric profiles. A physics-informed machine learning framework is proposed to systematically incorporate the first principles from classical physical inversion models into the learning workflow, with optimization constrained by radiative transfer equations. Global validation demonstrated a 30% reduction in root-mean-square error versus standalone methods. Under extreme humidity, the mean absolute error decreased from 4.87 K to 2.29 K (53% improvement). Continental-scale tests across five continents confirmed the superior generalizability of this model.

Jun Ma, Huanfeng Shen, Penghai Wu et al.

Land surface temperature (LST) is a key parameter when monitoring land surface processes. However, cloud contamination and the tradeoff between the spatial and temporal resolutions greatly impede the access to high-quality thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing data. Despite the massive efforts made to solve these dilemmas, it is still difficult to generate LST estimates with concurrent spatial completeness and a high spatio-temporal resolution. Land surface models (LSMs) can be used to simulate gapless LST with a high temporal resolution, but this usually comes with a low spatial resolution. In this paper, we present an integrated temperature fusion framework for satellite-observed and LSM-simulated LST data to map gapless LST at a 60-m spatial resolution and half-hourly temporal resolution. The global linear model (GloLM) model and the diurnal land surface temperature cycle (DTC) model are respectively performed as preprocessing steps for sensor and temporal normalization between the different LST data. The Landsat LST, Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) LST, and Community Land Model Version 5.0 (CLM 5.0)-simulated LST are then fused using a filter-based spatio-temporal integrated fusion model. Evaluations were implemented in an urban-dominated region (the city of Wuhan in China) and a natural-dominated region (the Heihe River Basin in China), in terms of accuracy, spatial variability, and diurnal temporal dynamics. Results indicate that the fused LST is highly consistent with actual Landsat LST data (in situ LST measurements), in terms of a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.94 (0.97-0.99), a mean absolute error of 0.71-0.98 K (0.82-3.17 K), and a root-mean-square error of 0.97-1.26 K (1.09-3.97 K).

Menghui Jiang, Huanfeng Shen, Jie Li et al.

Image fusion technology is widely used to fuse the complementary information between multi-source remote sensing images. Inspired by the frontier of deep learning, this paper first proposes a heterogeneous-integrated framework based on a novel deep residual cycle GAN. The proposed network consists of a forward fusion part and a backward degeneration feedback part. The forward part generates the desired fusion result from the various observations; the backward degeneration feedback part considers the imaging degradation process and regenerates the observations inversely from the fusion result. The proposed network can effectively fuse not only the homogeneous but also the heterogeneous information. In addition, for the first time, a heterogeneous-integrated fusion framework is proposed to simultaneously merge the complementary heterogeneous spatial, spectral and temporal information of multi-source heterogeneous observations. The proposed heterogeneous-integrated framework also provides a uniform mode that can complete various fusion tasks, including heterogeneous spatio-spectral fusion, spatio-temporal fusion, and heterogeneous spatio-spectral-temporal fusion. Experiments are conducted for two challenging scenarios of land cover changes and thick cloud coverage. Images from many remote sensing satellites, including MODIS, Landsat-8, Sentinel-1, and Sentinel-2, are utilized in the experiments. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Huanfeng Shen, Menghui Jiang, Jie Li et al.

In the fields of image restoration and image fusion, model-driven methods and data-driven methods are the two representative frameworks. However, both approaches have their respective advantages and disadvantages. The model-driven methods consider the imaging mechanism, which is deterministic and theoretically reasonable; however, they cannot easily model complicated nonlinear problems. The data-driven methods have a stronger prior knowledge learning capability for huge data, especially for nonlinear statistical features; however, the interpretability of the networks is poor, and they are over-dependent on training data. In this paper, we systematically investigate the coupling of model-driven and data-driven methods, which has rarely been considered in the remote sensing image restoration and fusion communities. We are the first to summarize the coupling approaches into the following three categories: 1) data-driven and model-driven cascading methods; 2) variational models with embedded learning; and 3) model-constrained network learning methods. The typical existing and potential coupling methods for remote sensing image restoration and fusion are introduced with application examples. This paper also gives some new insights into the potential future directions, in terms of both methods and applications.

Liupeng Lin, Jie Li, Huanfeng Shen et al.

The data fusion technology aims to aggregate the characteristics of different data and obtain products with multiple data advantages. To solves the problem of reduced resolution of PolSAR images due to system limitations, we propose a fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images and single-polarization synthetic aperture radar SAR (SinSAR) images fusion network to generate high-resolution PolSAR (HR-PolSAR) images. To take advantage of the polarimetric information of the low-resolution PolSAR (LR-PolSAR) image and the spatial information of the high-resolution single-polarization SAR (HR-SinSAR) image, we propose a fusion framework for joint LR-PolSAR image and HR-SinSAR image and design a cross-attention mechanism to extract features from the joint input data. Besides, based on the physical imaging mechanism, we designed the PolSAR polarimetric loss function for constrained network training. The experimental results confirm the superiority of fusion network over traditional algorithms. The average PSNR is increased by more than 3.6db, and the average MAE is reduced to less than 0.07. Experiments on polarimetric decomposition and polarimetric signature show that it maintains polarimetric information well.

Jiang He, Jie Li, Qiangqiang Yuan et al.

Hyperspectral images are crucial for many research works. Spectral super-resolution (SSR) is a method used to obtain high spatial resolution (HR) hyperspectral images from HR multispectral images. Traditional SSR methods include model-driven algorithms and deep learning. By unfolding a variational method, this paper proposes an optimization-driven convolutional neural network (CNN) with a deep spatial-spectral prior, resulting in physically interpretable networks. Unlike the fully data-driven CNN, auxiliary spectral response function (SRF) is utilized to guide CNNs to group the bands with spectral relevance. In addition, the channel attention module (CAM) and reformulated spectral angle mapper loss function are applied to achieve an effective reconstruction model. Finally, experiments on two types of datasets, including natural and remote sensing images, demonstrate the spectral enhancement effect of the proposed method. And the classification results on the remote sensing dataset also verified the validity of the information enhanced by the proposed method.

Zhiwei Li, Huanfeng Shen, Qing Cheng et al.

Cloud detection is an important preprocessing step for the precise application of optical satellite imagery. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based cloud detection method named multi-scale convolutional feature fusion (MSCFF) for remote sensing images of different sensors. In the network architecture of MSCFF, the symmetric encoder-decoder module, which provides both local and global context by densifying feature maps with trainable convolutional filter banks, is utilized to extract multi-scale and high-level spatial features. The feature maps of multiple scales are then up-sampled and concatenated, and a novel multi-scale feature fusion module is designed to fuse the features of different scales for the output. The two output feature maps of the network are cloud and cloud shadow maps, which are in turn fed to binary classifiers outside the model to obtain the final cloud and cloud shadow mask. The MSCFF method was validated on hundreds of globally distributed optical satellite images, with spatial resolutions ranging from 0.5 to 50 m, including Landsat-5/7/8, Gaofen-1/2/4, Sentinel-2, Ziyuan-3, CBERS-04, Huanjing-1, and collected high-resolution images exported from Google Earth. The experimental results show that MSCFF achieves a higher accuracy than the traditional rule-based cloud detection methods and the state-of-the-art deep learning models, especially in bright surface covered areas. The effectiveness of MSCFF means that it has great promise for the practical application of cloud detection for multiple types of medium and high-resolution remote sensing images. Our established global high-resolution cloud detection validation dataset has been made available online.

Xinxin Liu, Xiliang Lu, Huanfeng Shen et al.

Destriping is a classical problem in remote sensing image processing. Although considerable effort has been made to remove stripes, few of the existing methods can eliminate stripe noise with arbitrary orientations. This situation makes the removal of oblique stripes in the higher-level remote sensing products become an unfinished and urgent issue. To overcome the challenging problem, we propose a novel destriping model which is self-adjusted to different orientations of stripe noise. First of all, the oriented variation model is designed to accomplish the stripe orientation approximation. In this model, the stripe direction is automatically estimated and then imbedded into the constraint term to depict the along-stripe smoothness of the stripe component. Mainly based on the oriented variation model, a whole destriping framework is proposed by jointly employing an L1-norm constraint and a TV regularization to separately capture the global distribution property of stripe component and the piecewise smoothness of the clean image. The qualitative and quantitative experimental results of both orientation and destriping aspects confirm the effectiveness and stability of the proposed method.

Huanfeng Shen, Menghui Jiang, Jie Li et al.

In the field of spatial-spectral fusion, the model-based method and the deep learning (DL)-based method are state-of-the-art. This paper presents a fusion method that incorporates the deep neural network into the model-based method for the most common case in the spatial-spectral fusion: PAN/multispectral (MS) fusion. Specifically, we first map the gradient of the high spatial resolution panchromatic image (HR-PAN) and the low spatial resolution multispectral image (LR-MS) to the gradient of the high spatial resolution multispectral image (HR-MS) via a deep residual convolutional neural network (CNN). Then we construct a fusion framework by the LR-MS image, the gradient prior learned from the gradient network, and the ideal fused image. Finally, an iterative optimization algorithm is used to solve the fusion model. Both quantitative and visual assessments on high-quality images from various sources demonstrate that the proposed fusion method is superior to all the mainstream algorithms included in the comparison in terms of overall fusion accuracy.

Xin-Yi Tong, Gui-Song Xia, Qikai Lu et al.

In recent years, large amount of high spatial-resolution remote sensing (HRRS) images are available for land-cover mapping. However, due to the complex information brought by the increased spatial resolution and the data disturbances caused by different conditions of image acquisition, it is often difficult to find an efficient method for achieving accurate land-cover classification with high-resolution and heterogeneous remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a scheme to apply deep model obtained from labeled land-cover dataset to classify unlabeled HRRS images. The main idea is to rely on deep neural networks for presenting the contextual information contained in different types of land-covers and propose a pseudo-labeling and sample selection scheme for improving the transferability of deep models. More precisely, a deep Convolutional Neural Networks is first pre-trained with a well-annotated land-cover dataset, referred to as the source data. Then, given a target image with no labels, the pre-trained CNN model is utilized to classify the image in a patch-wise manner. The patches with high confidence are assigned with pseudo-labels and employed as the queries to retrieve related samples from the source data. The pseudo-labels confirmed with the retrieved results are regarded as supervised information for fine-tuning the pre-trained deep model. To obtain a pixel-wise land-cover classification with the target image, we rely on the fine-tuned CNN and develop a hybrid classification by combining patch-wise classification and hierarchical segmentation. In addition, we create a large-scale land-cover dataset containing 150 Gaofen-2 satellite images for CNN pre-training. Experiments on multi-source HRRS images show encouraging results and demonstrate the applicability of the proposed scheme to land-cover classification.

Qiangqiang Yuan, Qiang Zhang, Jie Li et al.

Hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising is a crucial preprocessing procedure to improve the performance of the subsequent HSI interpretation and applications. In this paper, a novel deep learning-based method for this task is proposed, by learning a non-linear end-to-end mapping between the noisy and clean HSIs with a combined spatial-spectral deep convolutional neural network (HSID-CNN). Both the spatial and spectral information are simultaneously assigned to the proposed network. In addition, multi-scale feature extraction and multi-level feature representation are respectively employed to capture both the multi-scale spatial-spectral feature and fuse the feature representations with different levels for the final restoration. The simulated and real-data experiments demonstrate that the proposed HSID-CNN outperforms many of the mainstream methods in both the quantitative evaluation indexes, visual effects, and HSI classification accuracy.

Qiangqiang Yuan, Yancong Wei, Xiangchao Meng et al.

Pan-sharpening is a fundamental and significant task in the field of remote sensing imagery processing, in which high-resolution spatial details from panchromatic images are employed to enhance the spatial resolution of multi-spectral (MS) images. As the transformation from low spatial resolution MS image to high-resolution MS image is complex and highly non-linear, inspired by the powerful representation for non-linear relationships of deep neural networks, we introduce multi-scale feature extraction and residual learning into the basic convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture and propose the multi-scale and multi-depth convolutional neural network (MSDCNN) for the pan-sharpening of remote sensing imagery. Both the quantitative assessment results and the visual assessment confirm that the proposed network yields high-resolution MS images that are superior to the images produced by the compared state-of-the-art methods.

Zhiwei Li, Huanfeng Shen, Huifang Li et al.

The wide field of view (WFV) imaging system onboard the Chinese GaoFen-1 (GF-1) optical satellite has a 16-m resolution and four-day revisit cycle for large-scale Earth observation. The advantages of the high temporal-spatial resolution and the wide field of view make the GF-1 WFV imagery very popular. However, cloud cover is an inevitable problem in GF-1 WFV imagery, which influences its precise application. Accurate cloud and cloud shadow detection in GF-1 WFV imagery is quite difficult due to the fact that there are only three visible bands and one near-infrared band. In this paper, an automatic multi-feature combined (MFC) method is proposed for cloud and cloud shadow detection in GF-1 WFV imagery. The MFC algorithm first implements threshold segmentation based on the spectral features and mask refinement based on guided filtering to generate a preliminary cloud mask. The geometric features are then used in combination with the texture features to improve the cloud detection results and produce the final cloud mask. Finally, the cloud shadow mask can be acquired by means of the cloud and shadow matching and follow-up correction process. The method was validated using 108 globally distributed scenes. The results indicate that MFC performs well under most conditions, and the average overall accuracy of MFC cloud detection is as high as 96.8%. In the contrastive analysis with the official provided cloud fractions, MFC shows a significant improvement in cloud fraction estimation, and achieves a high accuracy for the cloud and cloud shadow detection in the GF-1 WFV imagery with fewer spectral bands. The proposed method could be used as a preprocessing step in the future to monitor land-cover change, and it could also be easily extended to other optical satellite imagery which has a similar spectral setting.