In this work, we explore a post-processing method to enhance coarse semantic segmentation of historical aerial images. We propose to use deep edges to generate semantically meaningful superpixels that we integrate as additional pairwise potentials in a dense conditional random field. We apply our approach on very high resolution images acquired between 1975 and 1995 and annotated with land use land cover labels. Results show the interest of our approach compared to other post-processing methods.

We present an unsupervised colorization framework to improve both the visualization and the automatic land use classification of historical aerial images. We introduce a novel algorithm built upon a cyclic generative adversarial neural network and a texture replacement method to homogeneously and automatically colorize unpaired VHR images. We apply our framework on historical aerial images acquired in France between 1970 and 1990. We demonstrate that our approach helps to disentangle hard to classify land use classes and hence improves the overall land use classification.

The land cover reconstruction from monochromatic historical aerial images is a challenging task that has recently attracted an increasing interest from the scientific community with the proliferation of large-scale epidemiological studies involving retrospective analysis of spatial patterns. However, the efforts made by the computer vision community in remote-sensing applications are mostly focused on prospective approaches through the analysis of high-resolution multi-spectral data acquired by the advanced spatial programs. Hence, four contributions are proposed in this paper. They aim at providing a comparison basis for the future development of computer vision algorithms applied to the automation of the land cover reconstruction from monochromatic historical aerial images. First, a new multi-scale multi-date dataset composed of 4.9 million non-overlapping annotated patches of the France territory between 1970 and 1990 has been created with the help of geography experts. This dataset has been named HistAerial. Second, an extensive comparison study of the state-of-the-art texture features extraction and classification algorithms, including deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), has been performed. It is presented in the form of an evaluation. Third, a novel low-dimensional local texture filter named rotated-corner local binary pattern (R-CRLBP) is presented as a simplification of the binary gradient contours filter through the use of an orthogonal combination representation. Finally, a novel combination of low-dimensional texture descriptors, including the R-CRLBP filter, is introduced as a light combination of local binary patterns (LCoLBPs). The LCoLBP filter achieved state-of-the-art results on the HistAerial dataset while conserving a relatively low-dimensional feature vector space compared with the DCNN approaches (17 times shorter).