Xiangtao Zheng

Zhang Yue, Zheng Xiangtao, Lu Xiaoqiang

Remote sensing scene classification aims to assign a specific semantic label to a remote sensing image. Recently, convolutional neural networks have greatly improved the performance of remote sensing scene classification. However, some confused images may be easily recognized as the incorrect category, which generally degrade the performance. The differences between image pairs can be used to distinguish image categories. This paper proposed a pairwise comparison network, which contains two main steps: pairwise selection and pairwise representation. The proposed network first selects similar image pairs, and then represents the image pairs with pairwise representations. The self-representation is introduced to highlight the informative parts of each image itself, while the mutual-representation is proposed to capture the subtle differences between image pairs. Comprehensive experimental results on two challenging datasets (AID, NWPU-RESISC45) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed network. The codes are provided in https://github.com/spectralpublic/PCNet.git.

Chunwei Tian, Mingjian Song, Xiaopeng Fan et al.

Deep convolutional neural networks can extract more accurate structural information via deep architectures to obtain good performance in image super-resolution. However, it is not easy to find effect of important layers in a single network architecture to decrease performance of super-resolution. In this paper, we design a tree-guided CNN for image super-resolution (TSRNet). It uses a tree architecture to guide a deep network to enhance effect of key nodes to amplify the relation of hierarchical information for improving the ability of recovering images. To prevent insufficiency of the obtained structural information, cosine transform techniques in the TSRNet are used to extract cross-domain information to improve the performance of image super-resolution. Adaptive Nesterov momentum optimizer (Adan) is applied to optimize parameters to boost effectiveness of training a super-resolution model. Extended experiments can verify superiority of the proposed TSRNet for restoring high-quality images. Its code can be obtained at https://github.com/hellloxiaotian/TSRNet.

Long Lan, Fengxiang Wang, Xiangtao Zheng et al.

Fine-grained ship classification in remote sensing (RS-FGSC) poses a significant challenge due to the high similarity between classes and the limited availability of labeled data, limiting the effectiveness of traditional supervised classification methods. Recent advancements in large pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in few-shot or zero-shot learning, particularly in understanding image content. This study delves into harnessing the potential of VLMs to enhance classification accuracy for unseen ship categories, which holds considerable significance in scenarios with restricted data due to cost or privacy constraints. Directly fine-tuning VLMs for RS-FGSC often encounters the challenge of overfitting the seen classes, resulting in suboptimal generalization to unseen classes, which highlights the difficulty in differentiating complex backgrounds and capturing distinct ship features. To address these issues, we introduce a novel prompt tuning technique that employs a hierarchical, multi-granularity prompt design. Our approach integrates remote sensing ship priors through bias terms, learned from a small trainable network. This strategy enhances the model's generalization capabilities while improving its ability to discern intricate backgrounds and learn discriminative ship features. Furthermore, we contribute to the field by introducing a comprehensive dataset, FGSCM-52, significantly expanding existing datasets with more extensive data and detailed annotations for less common ship classes. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over current state-of-the-art techniques. The source code will be made publicly available.

Hailong Ning, Xiangtao Zheng, Yuan Yuan et al.

Audio is the main form for the visually impaired to obtain information. In reality, all kinds of visual data always exist, but audio data does not exist in many cases. In order to help the visually impaired people to better perceive the information around them, an image-to-audio-description (I2AD) task is proposed to generate audio descriptions from images in this paper. To complete this totally new task, a modal translation network (MT-Net) from visual to auditory sense is proposed. The proposed MT-Net includes three progressive sub-networks: 1) feature learning, 2) cross-modal mapping, and 3) audio generation. First, the feature learning sub-network aims to learn semantic features from image and audio, including image feature learning and audio feature learning. Second, the cross-modal mapping sub-network transforms the image feature into a cross-modal representation with the same semantic concept as the audio feature. In this way, the correlation of inter-modal data is effectively mined for easing the heterogeneous gap between image and audio. Finally, the audio generation sub-network is designed to generate the audio waveform from the cross-modal representation. The generated audio waveform is interpolated to obtain the corresponding audio file according to the sample frequency. Being the first attempt to explore the I2AD task, three large-scale datasets with plenty of manual audio descriptions are built. Experiments on the datasets verify the feasibility of generating intelligible audio from an image directly and the effectiveness of proposed method.