Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2310.07995

HeightFormer: A Multilevel Interaction and Image-adaptive Classification-regression Network for Monocular Height Estimation with Aerial Images

Abstract

Height estimation has long been a pivotal topic within measurement and remote sensing disciplines, proving critical for endeavours such as 3D urban modelling, MR and autonomous driving. Traditional methods utilise stereo matching or multisensor fusion, both well-established techniques that typically necessitate multiple images from varying perspectives and adjunct sensors like SAR, leading to substantial deployment costs. Single image height estimation has emerged as an attractive alternative, boasting a larger data source variety and simpler deployment. However, current methods suffer from limitations such as fixed receptive fields, a lack of global information interaction, leading to noticeable instance-level height deviations. The inherent complexity of height prediction can result in a blurry estimation of object edge depth when using mainstream regression methods based on fixed height division. This paper presents a comprehensive solution for monocular height estimation in remote sensing, termed HeightFormer, combining multilevel interactions and image-adaptive classification-regression. It features the Multilevel Interaction Backbone (MIB) and Image-adaptive Classification-regression Height Generator (ICG). MIB supplements the fixed sample grid in CNN of the conventional backbone network with tokens of different interaction ranges. It is complemented by a pixel-, patch-, and feature map-level hierarchical interaction mechanism, designed to relay spatial geometry information across different scales and introducing a global receptive field to enhance the quality of instance-level height estimation. The ICG dynamically generates height partition for each image and reframes the traditional regression task, using a refinement from coarse to fine classification-regression that significantly mitigates the innate ill-posedness issue and drastically improves edge sharpness.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Zhan Chen, Yidan Zhang, Xiyu Qi, Yongqiang Mao, Xin Zhou, Lulu Niu, Hui Wu, Lei Wang, Yunping Ge. 2023-10-12. HeightFormer: A Multilevel Interaction and Image-adaptive Classification-regression Network for Monocular Height Estimation with Aerial Images. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07995

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Privacy Leakage on DNNs: A Survey of Model Inversion Attacks and Defenses

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have revolutionized various domains with their exceptional performance across numerous applications. However, Model Inversion (MI) attacks, which disclose private information about the training dataset by abusing access to the trained models, have emerged as a formidable privacy threat. Given a trained network, these attacks enable adversaries to reconstruct high-fidelity data that closely aligns with the private training samples, posing significant privacy concerns. Despite the rapid advances in the field, we lack a comprehensive and systematic overview of existing MI attacks and defenses. To fill this gap, this paper thoroughly investigates this realm and presents a holistic survey. Firstly, our work briefly reviews early MI studies on traditional machine learning scenarios. We then elaborately analyze and compare numerous recent attacks and defenses on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) across multiple modalities and learning tasks. By meticulously analyzing their distinctive features, we summarize and classify these methods into different categories and provide a novel taxonomy. Finally, this paper discusses promising research directions and presents potential solutions to open issues. To facilitate further study on MI attacks and defenses, we have implemented an open-source model inversion toolbox on GitHub (https://github.com/ffhibnese/Model-Inversion-Attack-ToolBox).

cs.CV

ALINA: Advanced Line Identification and Notation Algorithm

Labels are the cornerstone of supervised machine learning algorithms. Most visual recognition methods are fully supervised, using bounding boxes or pixel-wise segmentations for object localization. Traditional labeling methods, such as crowd-sourcing, are prohibitive due to cost, data privacy, amount of time, and potential errors on large datasets. To address these issues, we propose a novel annotation framework, Advanced Line Identification and Notation Algorithm (ALINA), which can be used for labeling taxiway datasets that consist of different camera perspectives and variable weather attributes (sunny and cloudy). Additionally, the CIRCular threshoLd pixEl Discovery And Traversal (CIRCLEDAT) algorithm has been proposed, which is an integral step in determining the pixels corresponding to taxiway line markings. Once the pixels are identified, ALINA generates corresponding pixel coordinate annotations on the frame. Using this approach, 60,249 frames from the taxiway dataset, AssistTaxi have been labeled. To evaluate the performance, a context-based edge map (CBEM) set was generated manually based on edge features and connectivity. The detection rate after testing the annotated labels with the CBEM set was recorded as 98.45%, attesting its dependability and effectiveness.

cs.CV

DisasterInsight: A Building-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Vision--Language Models in Disaster Response

Vision--language models (VLMs) show promise for disaster-response remote sensing, but existing benchmarks mainly emphasize scene-level or damage-centric assessment. To study this building-centric gap, we introduce \method{}, a diagnostic benchmark built on xBD, a pre/post-disaster satellite dataset with building-level damage labels. \method{} enriches building instances with OpenStreetMap-derived functional labels and contains 134{,}108 task-specific instruction records across 15 task types, spanning instance-level assessment, scene-level counting, multi-instance reasoning, and structured report generation. The benchmark supports RGB pre/post-disaster imagery, single- and multi-view instance formulations, and scene-level RGB/SAR diagnostic inputs. Experiments with general-domain and remote-sensing VLMs show that models perform better on visible damage cues than on building-function understanding, multi-instance reasoning, counting, and grounded reporting. Instruction tuning improves performance on several tasks but does not close this building-centric gap.

cs.CV