Georgios Voulgaris

Georgios Voulgaris

Modern deep learning models operating on multi-modal visual signals often rely on inductive biases that are poorly aligned with the physical processes governing signal formation, leading to brittle performance under cross-spectral and real-world conditions. In particular, approaches that prioritise direct thermal cues struggle to capture indirect yet persistent environmental alterations induced by sustained heat emissions. This work introduces a physics-aware representation learning framework that leverages multi-spectral information to model stable signatures of long-term physical processes. Specifically, a geological Short Wave Infrared (SWIR) ratio sensitive to soil property changes is integrated with Thermal Infrared (TIR) data through an intermediate fusion architecture, instantiated as FusionNet. The proposed backbone embeds trainable differential signal-processing priors within convolutional layers, combines mixed pooling strategies, and employs wider receptive fields to enhance robustness across spectral modalities. Systematic ablations show that each architectural component contributes to performance gains, with DGCNN achieving 88.7% accuracy on the SWIR ratio and FusionNet reaching 90.6%, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines across five spectral configurations. Transfer learning experiments further show that ImageNet pretraining degrades TIR performance, highlighting the importance of modality-aware training for cross-spectral learning. Evaluated on real-world data, the results demonstrate that combining physics-aware feature selection with principled deep learning architectures yields robust and generalisable representations, illustrating how first-principles signal modelling can improve multi-spectral learning under challenging conditions.

Georgios Voulgaris

The accurate semantic segmentation of tree crowns within remotely sensed data is crucial for scientific endeavours such as forest management, biodiversity studies, and carbon sequestration quantification. However, precise segmentation remains challenging due to complexities in the forest canopy, including shadows, intricate backgrounds, scale variations, and subtle spectral differences among tree species. Compared to the traditional methods, Deep Learning models improve accuracy by extracting informative and discriminative features, but often fall short in capturing the aforementioned complexities. To address these challenges, we propose PerceptiveNet, a novel model incorporating a Logarithmic Gabor-parameterised convolutional layer with trainable filter parameters, alongside a backbone that extracts salient features while capturing extensive context and spatial information through a wider receptive field. We investigate the impact of Log-Gabor, Gabor, and standard convolutional layers on semantic segmentation performance through extensive experimentation. Additionally, we conduct an ablation study to assess the contributions of individual layers and their combinations to overall model performance, and we evaluate PerceptiveNet as a backbone within a novel hybrid CNN-Transformer model. Our results outperform state-of-the-art models, demonstrating significant performance improvements on a tree crown dataset while generalising across domains, including two benchmark aerial scene semantic segmentation datasets with varying complexities.