Yuli Sun

dblp:136/6161 · DBLP profile ↗
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32ranked-venue papers
19as first author
28since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-1828-0392ORCID · verified

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 19 · 8 first-author · 18 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 8 · 8 first-author · 6 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 4 · 3 first-author · 3 since 2021Computer networks · 1 · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Iterative Global Mapping-Local Searching for Heterogeneous Change Detection with Unregistered Images
Yuli Sun, Junzheng Wu, Han Zhang 0005, Lin Lei, Gangyao Kuang
Int. J. Comput. Vis.1
2026 Leveraging image transformation and optical flow for heterogeneous change detection under co-registration errors
Yuli Sun, Lin Lei, Gangyao Kuang
Pattern Recognit.1
2026 Change-Prior-Guided Unsupervised Change Detection of Heterogeneous Remote Sensing Images
abstract
Heterogeneous change detection (HeCD) enables the identification of land-cover changes using remote sensing imagery obtained from different sensors. Most existing methods overly emphasize modality transformation and shared feature extraction to bridge the gap between heterogeneous images. While these strategies facilitate comparable representations, they tend to neglect the intrinsic characteristics of the changes themselves, which limits their effectiveness in complex scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we propose a change prior-guided image transformation model (CPIT) for unsupervised HeCD. Specifically, starting from the definition of change detection, we analyze the connections among pairwise object relationships, change labels, and change semantics, and then derive change semantic consistency and inconsistency rules solely from the inherent nature of the change detection problem, without relying on data-specific assumptions. These rules are subsequently encoded as change semantic consistency and inconsistency constraints, which, from the perspective of graph signal processing, correspond to low-pass and high-pass spectral properties of the change signals. Finally, by integrating these semantic constraints with sparsity priors and image transformation constraints, we formulate a more precise transformation model for HeCD. Solving this model produces change detection results that conform to the change priors, thereby improving the detection performance. The derivation, formulation, and utilization of change priors in this work offer valuable insights for broader change detection research. Extensive experiments on five datasets validate the effectiveness of CPIT. The code will be released at https://github.com/yulisun/CPIT.
Yuli Sun, Lin Lei, Gangyao Kuang
IEEE Trans. Image Process.1
2025 SAR-TinySNN: A Lightweight Spiking Neural Network for SAR Target Recognition
Hao Sun 0042, Yuli Sun, Tao Tang 0006, Lin Lei, Kefeng Ji
IEEE Geosci. Remote. Sens. Lett.3
2025 DiffDual-AD: Diffusion-Based Dual-Stage Adversarial Defense Framework in Remote Sensing With Denoiser Constraint
abstract
Deep neural networks (DNNs), though highly effective in various Earth observation tasks with remote sensing images (RSIs), are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, threatening their reliability. Each maliciously attacked RSI potentially contains unique and critical information, but current defenses lack a unified framework for rapidly detecting adversarial RSIs and accurately restoring them to their natural state. To bridge this research gap, we propose a diffusion-based dual-stage adversarial defense (DiffDual-AD) framework. In the first stage, we propose a novel adversarial detection method based on the score expectation (AD-SE), which is integrated into the forward process of diffusion model with an improved denoiser constrained for adversarial defense. During the reverse process, the second stage introduces the distance and label-guided adversarial purification (DL-GAP) to restore adversarial RSIs to natural ones. With the help of two proposed guidelines and the specific denoiser, the DL-GAP effectively smooths out the adversarial perturbations from the detected adversarial RSIs while preserving semantic information and local key features. Finally, DL-GAP yields nonadversarial purified RSIs based on the results of AD-SE. Both stages are integrated within the diffusion models, complementing each other to form a pipelined operational mode. Extensive experiments across three RSI scene classification datasets have proven its efficacy in resisting adversarial RSIs in both whitebox and black-box scenarios, achieving an average adversarial detection accuracy of 87.02% with AD-SE and an average final classification accuracy of 81.50% with the entire DiffDual-AD. The performances of our proposed AD-SE and DL-GAP have surpassed other advanced adversarial detection and purification methods when applied to RSIs. Therefore, DiffDual-AD provides a unified and universal solution to preserve the utility and security of processing the adversarial RSIs, which advances the adversarial defense research in remote sensing.
Zihao Lu, Hao Sun 0042, Lin Lei, Yuli Sun, Gangyao Kuang
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.5
2025 Signed Graph-Based Image Transformation for Heterogeneous Change Detection
abstract
Heterogeneous change detection (HeCD) is a highly valuable yet challenging task in remote sensing. To enable the comparison of heterogeneous images with different imaging mechanisms, some structural consistency-based image transformation methods have been proposed, which utilize graph models to represent image structures and constrain the transformed images and original images to have the same structural characteristics on the graph model. Consequently, these graph-based methods face two challenges: adequately characterizing the image structure and effectively utilizing the change information. To address these challenges, this article proposes a signed graph-based image transformation (SGIT) method for unsupervised HeCD. First, we analyze the limitations of previous unsigned graph-based methods in capturing the image structure, which leads to the failure to detect changes in some scenes. In light of this, we construct signed graph models that utilize positive/negative weights to represent the similarity/dissimilarity relationships within the image, respectively, and employ adaptive weighting, negative sampling, and neighborhood expansion strategies to bolster the structure representation capability of signed graphs. Second, we analyze how the change would induce a bimodal distribution of vertex feature distances in original and transformed images. Subsequently, a distribution-induced reweighted graph Laplacian regularization (RGLR) is proposed to exploit this prior change information. Finally, a more accuracy image transformation model is obtained by incorporating three types of constraints: signed graph-based structural consistency term, bimodal distribution-induced RGLR, and change sparsity-based penalty term. Extensive comparative experiments on five real datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed SGIT.
Yuli Sun, Ming Li 0066, Lin Lei, Gangyao Kuang
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2025 Beyond Spatial Priors: Spectral-Aware Hyperspectral Anomaly Detection Network via Heterogeneous-Homogeneous Super-Band and Quaternionic Sparse Representation
abstract
When incorporating spatial priors (such as sparsity and low occurrence frequency) to identify anomalies, existing hyperspectral anomaly detection (HAD) methods typically operate on the original high-dimensional spectral bands or features obtained through dimensionality-reduction techniques. However, they often neglect the explicit modeling and exploitation of the internal discriminative structure inherent in bands, consequently diluting the discriminative spectral information crucial for effective anomaly-background separation. This limitation becomes particularly pronounced when processing hyperspectral data, where the rich spectral heterogeneity could provide valuable discriminative cues for HAD. To address this issue, we propose a super-band quaternion-guided sparse network (SuperB-QSNet), which explicitly encodes the spectral discriminant structure while retaining the advantage of spatial sparse priorities. First, a heterogeneous-homogeneous super-band compression (HH-SBC) organizes spectral bands into meaningful hetero-groups. It naturally reduces redundancy and retains the representative spectral information. Second, the quaternionic sparse recovery (QSR) model encodes both spatial structures and intra-group spectral correlations via hypercomplex algebra, ensuring robust anomaly preservation and enhanced detection of spectral variations. Third, we design a differences-guided quaternionic convolution detector (DG-QCD) to maintain spectral coherence via group processing and enhance discriminative capability via inter-group difference operation. Extensive experiments show that SuperB-QSNet enhances anomaly detection accuracy while ensuring computational efficiency across real-world hyperspectral datasets.
Xianyue Wang, Yuli Sun, Tao Tang 0006, Lin Lei
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.2
2025 Enhancing Geolocation Accuracy of High-Altitude Airborne SAR Through Tropospheric Delay Compensation
abstract
Geolocation is a crucial step in the processing of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. High-altitude airborne SAR systems present unique geolocation challenges due to travelling long distances through the troposphere. However, the impact of tropospheric delay on geolocation is often overlooked in existing airborne SAR studies, which can lead to inaccuracies. To address this issue, we propose a new positioning method, the tropospheric delay-compensated range-Doppler (TDC-RD) model. The TDC-RD model leverages reference atmospheric models to estimate and compensate for the tropospheric delay in SAR images. This model effectively mitigates the impact of tropospheric delay in SAR geolocation. To further optimize the TDC-RD model solution, a digital elevation model (DEM)-assisted dual iteration method is proposed. This method iteratively adjusts the target’s plane position and elevation in an alternating manner. The effectiveness of the TDC-RD model has been validated through both simulation experiments and actual flight experiments. The results show a significant improvement in geolocation accuracy compared to existing methods, with a maximum reduction of 11.39 m and 24.33% in the mean absolute error (MAE) of SAR geolocation. The TDC-RD model has a great advantage in long-range SAR geolocation. Our research enhances the accuracy and stability of high-altitude airborne SAR geolocation without requiring ground control points.
Yaobing Xiang, Yuli Sun, Lin Lei, Kefeng Ji, Gangyao Kuang
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.2
2025 Cross-Sensor SAR Image Target Detection Based on Dynamic Feature Discrimination and Center-Aware Calibration
abstract
In practical SAR target detection applications, it is often encountered that the training and testing data come from different SAR sensors, leading to a decline in SAR target detection performance. Although domain adaptation methods can achieve model generalization through feature transfer, the change of scattering characteristics for the same target and the difference of feature distribution, caused by cross-sensor, cannot be ignored in SAR images. It is inevitable to lead to the escalation of the offset in the bounding box regression and deviation of the feature alignment. To address these issues, a cross-sensor SAR image target detection method based on dynamic feature discrimination and center-aware calibration is proposed. Based on the domain adaptation framework, initially, a Dynamic Feature Discrimination Module (DFDM) is introduced to address the exacerbated offset in the regression. A bidirectional spatial feature aggregation mechanism is employed to aggregate features in both horizontal and vertical directions and a multi-scale structure is adopted to enhance the scattering and semantic features, which can dynamically constrain the target position while improving target discrimination capability. Then, the Center-Aware Calibration Module (CACM) is designed to address the alignment deviation in feature transfer. The target salience relationship is modeled based on the distance between different positions and the target center to suppress background clutter interference. The perception center of the target is focused by combining the centerness map and classification map, which can calibrate the domain-invariant features and alleviate misalignment. Finally, the proposed method is tested on two datasets, MiniSAR and FARAD, and compared with the latest domain adaption methods. Both mAP and F1 values have improved by more than 6%-20%, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Siqian Zhang, Zhongzhen Sun, Chenfang Liu, Yuli Sun, Kefeng Ji, Gangyao Kuang
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.5
2025 Locality Preservation for Unsupervised Multimodal Change Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery
abstract
Multimodal change detection (MCD) is a topic of increasing interest in remote sensing. Due to different imaging mechanisms, the multimodal images cannot be directly compared to detect the changes. In this article, we explore the topological structure of multimodal images and construct the links between class relationships (same/different) and change labels (changed/unchanged) of pairwise superpixels, which are imaging modality-invariant. With these links, we formulate the MCD problem within a mathematical framework termed the locality-preserving energy model (LPEM), which is used to maintain the local consistency constraints embedded in the links: the structure consistency based on feature similarity and the label consistency based on spatial continuity. Because the foundation of LPEM, i.e., the links, is intuitively explainable and universal, the proposed method is very robust across different MCD situations. Noteworthy, LPEM is built directly on the label of each superpixel, so it is a paradigm that outputs the change map (CM) directly without the need to generate intermediate difference image (DI) as most previous algorithms have done. Experiments on different real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Source code of the proposed method is made available at https://github.com/yulisun/LPEM.
Yuli Sun, Lin Lei, Dongdong Guan, Gangyao Kuang, Li Liu 0002
IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Learn. Syst.1
2024 Image Regression With Structure Cycle Consistency for Heterogeneous Change Detection
abstract
Change detection (CD) between heterogeneous images is an increasingly interesting topic in remote sensing. The different imaging mechanisms lead to the failure of homogeneous CD methods on heterogeneous images. To address this challenge, we propose a structure cycle consistency-based image regression method, which consists of two components: the exploration of structure representation and the structure-based regression. We first construct a similarity relationship-based graph to capture the structure information of image; here, a k -selection strategy and an adaptive-weighted distance metric are employed to connect each node with its truly similar neighbors. Then, we conduct the structure-based regression with this adaptively learned graph. More specifically, we transform one image to the domain of the other image via the structure cycle consistency, which yields three types of constraints: forward transformation term, cycle transformation term, and sparse regularization term. Noteworthy, it is not a traditional pixel value-based image regression, but an image structure regression, i.e., it requires the transformed image to have the same structure as the original image. Finally, change extraction can be achieved accurately by directly comparing the transformed and original images. Experiments conducted on different real datasets show the excellent performance of the proposed method. The source code of the proposed method will be made available at https://github.com/yulisun/AGSCC.
Yuli Sun, Lin Lei, Dongdong Guan, Junzheng Wu, Gangyao Kuang, Li Liu 0002
IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Learn. Syst.1
2023 Change Alignment-Based Graph Structure Learning for Unsupervised Heterogeneous Change Detection
abstract
Heterogeneous change detection (HCD) in remote sensing has gained significant attention. Heterogeneous images come from different sensors, which cannot be compared directly to detect changes. This letter proposes a change alignment-based graph structure learning method (CAGSL) for unsupervised HCD, which detects changes by calculating forward and backward structure differences. To achieve this objective, CAGSL incorporates two pivotal improvements. Firstly, CAGSL utilizes a graph auto-encoder (GAE) to optimize the graph structure, enabling a more accurate representation of the topological relationships between the real land covers. Secondly, CAGSL introduces a change alignment constraint based on the HCD task property that the forward and backward structural differences represent the same change event in order to enhance the optimization of the graph structure. Subsequently, the optimized graph structure is used to compute the structure difference images through graph mapping. Finally, the change map (CM) is obtained through Otsu segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CAGSL when compared to some state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.
Kuowei Xiao, Yuli Sun, Gangyao Kuang, Lin Lei
IEEE Geosci. Remote. Sens. Lett.2
2023 Structural Regression Fusion for Unsupervised Multimodal Change Detection
abstract
Multimodal change detection (MCD) is an increasingly interesting but very challenging topic in remote sensing, which is due to the unavailability of detecting changes by directly comparing multimodal images from different domains. In this paper, we first analyze the structural asymmetry between multitemporal images and show their negative impact on the previous MCD methods using image structures. Specifically, when there is a structural asymmetry, previous structure based methods can only complete a structure comparison or image regression in one direction and fails in the other direction, that is, they cannot transform or convert from complex structural images (with more categories) to simple structural images (with fewer categories). To reduce the influence of structural asymmetry, we propose a structural regression fusion based method (SRF) that simultaneously transforms the pre-event and post-event images into the image domain of each other, calculating the forward and backward changed images, respectively. Noteworthy, different from previous late fusion methods that fuse the forward and backward changed images in the post-processing stage, SRF incorporates fusion into the regression process, which can fully explore the connection between changed images, and thus improve image transformation performance and obtain better changed images. Specifically, SRF yields three types of constraints to perform the fused image transformation: structure consistency based regression term, change smoothness and alignment based fusion term, and prior sparsity based penalty term. Finally, the changes can be extracted by comparing the transformed and original images. The proposed SRF is verified on six real data sets by comparing with some state-of-the-art methods. Source code of the proposed method will be made available at https://github.com/yulisun/SRF.
Yuli Sun, Lin Lei, Li Liu 0002, Gangyao Kuang
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2022 Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement-Learning-Based Distributed Dynamic Spectrum Access in Cognitive Radio Networks
abstract
With the development of wireless communication and Internet of Things (IoT), there are massive wireless devices that need to share the limited spectrum resources. Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is a promising paradigm to remedy the problem of inefficient spectrum utilization brought upon by the historical command-and-control approach to spectrum allocation. In this article, we investigate the distributed DSA problem for multiusers in a typical multichannel cognitive radio network. The problem is formulated as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP), and we propose a centralized off-line training and distributed online execution framework based on cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). We employ the deep recurrent$Q$-network (DRQN) to address the partial observability of the state for each cognitive user. The ultimate goal is to learn a cooperative strategy which maximizes the sum throughput of a cognitive radio network in a distributed fashion without information exchange between cognitive users. Finally, we validate the proposed algorithm in various settings through extensive experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed CoMARL-DSA algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art deep$Q$-learning for spectrum access (DQSA) in terms of successful access rate and collision rate by at least 14% and 12%, respectively.
Xiang Tan, Li Zhou 0002, Haijun Wang 0003, Yuli Sun, Haitao Zhao 0001, Boon-Chong Seet, Jibo Wei, Victor C. M. Leung
IEEE Internet Things J.4
2022 Adaptive Local Structure Consistency-Based Heterogeneous Remote Sensing Change Detection
abstract
Change detection (CD) of heterogeneous remote sensing images is a challenging topic, which plays an important role in natural disaster emergency response. Due to the different imaging mechanisms of heterogeneous sensors, it is hard to directly compare the images. To address this challenge, we explore an unsupervised CD method based on adaptive local structure consistency (ALSC) between heterogeneous images in this letter, which constructs an adaptive graph representing the local structure for each patch in one image domain and then projects this graph to the other image domain to measure the change level. This local structure consistency exploits the fact that the heterogeneous images share the same structure information for the same ground object, which is imaging modality-invariant. To avoid heterogeneous data confusion, the pixelwise change image is calculated in the same image domain by graph projection. By comparing with some state-of-the-art methods, the experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed ALSC-based CD method.
Lin Lei, Yuli Sun, Gangyao Kuang
IEEE Geosci. Remote. Sens. Lett.2
2022 A Cross-Layer Nonlocal Network for Remote Sensing Scene Classification
abstract
Remote sensing scene classification (RSSC) is a fundamental yet challenging task in the domain of remote sensing (RS). Currently, the methods based on deep features from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have significantly improved the scene classification accuracy (ACC). However, the standard convolution operations have limited capacity to model the long-range correlations and cannot effectively obtain global contextual understanding ability. In this letter, we propose a novel scene classification framework, termed cross-layer nonlocal network (CL-NL-Net), consisting of a backbone network, a cross-layer nonlocal (CL-NL) module, and a classifier. Among them, the backbone network is used to obtain multilayer convolutional features. The CL-NL module is the core of the proposed method, which captures the long-range correlations between different layers, so as to achieve a better global scene understanding ability. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed CL-NL-Net, we conduct experiments on four benchmark datasets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive classification ACC and outperforms some state-of-the-art methods.
Ming Li 0066, Lin Lei, Yuli Sun, Xiao Li 0017, Gangyao Kuang
IEEE Geosci. Remote. Sens. Lett.3
2022 Iterative structure transformation and conditional random field based method for unsupervised multimodal change detection
Yuli Sun, Lin Lei, Dongdong Guan, Junzheng Wu, Gangyao Kuang
Pattern Recognit.1
2022 Dynamic-Hierarchical Attention Distillation With Synergetic Instance Selection for Land Cover Classification Using Missing Heterogeneity Images
abstract
Optical and SAR modalities can provide the complementary information on the land properties, which usually lead to more robust and better classification performance. However, due to the restriction of imaging condition, not all modalities included into the training data sets could be available in real testing samples. Therefore, it is important to explore how to learn discriminative representations using multimodal data during the training stage, while achieving fine land cover classification using missing modalities at test time. In this article, we propose a novel dynamic-hierarchical attention distillation network (DH-ADNet) with multimodal synergetic instance selection (MSIS) for land cover classification using missing data modalities. First, the MSIS realizes the selection of the most representative multimodal instances to enhance the DH-ADNet’s ability of discriminative feature extraction. Then, the DH-ADNet is training on the basis of the curriculum learning strategy and promotes the hallucination stream to learn the privileged information. In particular, a novel dynamic-hierarchical attention distillation module (DH-ADM) is introduced, which adaptively highlights different contributions of multilayer attention distillation by carefully exploring the classification losses of multilayer features over the training iterations. Comprehensive evaluations on two coregistered optical and SAR data sets and report state-of-the-art results in the privileged information scenario.
Xiao Li 0017, Lin Lei, Yuli Sun, Gangyao Kuang
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.3
2022 Graph Signal Processing for Heterogeneous Change Detection
abstract
This paper provides a new strategy for the heterogeneous change detection (HCD) problem: solving HCD from the perspective of graph signal processing (GSP). We construct a graph to represent the structure of each image, and treat each image as a graph signal defined on the graph. In this way, we convert the HCD into a GSP problem: a comparison of the responses of signals on systems defined on the graphs, which attempts to find structural differences and signal differences due to the changes between heterogeneous images. Firstly, we analyze the GSP for HCD from the vertex domain. We show that once a region has changed, the local structure of image changes,i.e. the connectivity of the vertex containing this region changes. Therefore, we can compare the output signals of the same input graph signal passing through filters defined on the two graphs to detect changes. We analyze the negative effects of changing regions on the change detection results from the viewpoint of signal propagation, and we also design different filters from the vertex domain to explore the high-order neighborhood information hidden in original graphs. Secondly, we analyze the GSP for HCD from the spectral domain. We explore the spectral properties of different images on the same graph, and show that their spectra exhibit commonalities and dissimilarities. Specifically, it is the change that leads to the dissimilarities of their spectra. With the help of graph spectral analysis, we propose a regression model for the HCD, which decomposes the source signal into the regressed signal and changed signal, and constrains the spectral property of the regressed signal. Experiments conducted on seven real data sets show the effectiveness of the vertex domain filtering based and spectral domain analysis based HCD methods. Source code will be made available at https://github.com/yulisun/HCD-GSP.
Yuli Sun, Lin Lei, Dongdong Guan, Gangyao Kuang, Li Liu 0002
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2022 Sparse-Constrained Adaptive Structure Consistency-Based Unsupervised Image Regression for Heterogeneous Remote-Sensing Change Detection
abstract
Change detection of heterogeneous multitemporal satellite images is an important and challenging topic in remote sensing. Since the imaging mechanisms of heterogeneous sensors are different, it is not possible to directly compare heterogeneous images to detect changes as in the homogeneous images. To address this challenge, we propose an unsupervised image regression-based change detection method based on the structure consistency. The proposed method first adaptively constructs a similarity graph to represent the structure of a pre-event image, then uses the graph to translate the pre-event image to the domain of the post-event image, and then computes the difference image. Finally, a superpixel-based Markovian segmentation model is designed to segment the difference image into changed and unchanged classes. The proposed adaptive structure consistency-based image regression model can not only alleviate the impact of noise and changed pixels on the regression process by using the structure-based transformation, but also easily distinguish between changed and unchanged classes in the difference image by using the prior sparse knowledge of changes. Experimental results on six different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing with some state-of-the-art methods.
Yuli Sun, Lin Lei, Dongdong Guan, Ming Li 0066, Gangyao Kuang
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2022 Structure Consistency-Based Graph for Unsupervised Change Detection With Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Remote Sensing Images
abstract
Change detection (CD) of remote sensing (RS) images is one of the important problems in earth observation, which has been extensively studied in recent years. However, with the development of RS technology, the specific characteristics of remotely sensed images, including sensor characteristics, resolutions, noises, and distortions in imagery, make the CD more complex. In this article, we propose a structure consistency-based method for CD, which detects changes by comparing the structures of two images, rather than comparing the pixel values of images. Because the image structure is imaging modality-invariant and not sensitive to noise, illumination, and other interference factors, the proposed method can be applied to a variety of CD scenarios and has strong robustness. Structural comparison is realized by constructing and mapping an improved nonlocal patch-based graph (NLPG) to avoid the data leakage of two images. First, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in homogeneous and heterogeneous CD, which shows that the proposed method can be used as a unified CD framework. Second, we extend the method to the heterogeneous CD with multichannel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image, which can provide a reference for future research as the heterogeneous CD with multichannel SAR is rarely studied. Third, through the decomposition and in-depth analysis of NLPG, we modify the graph construction process, structure difference calculation, and the difference image fusion to make it more robust and accurate. Experiments on six scenarios 12 data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Yuli Sun, Lin Lei, Xiao Li 0017, Xiang Tan, Gangyao Kuang
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2021 A Multi-Scale Feature Aggregation Network Based on Channel-Spatial Attention for Remote Sensing Scene Classification
abstract
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been shown remarkable performance in the task of remote sensing image scene classification. Recent works demonstrate that aggregating multi-scale convolutional features can significantly improve the classification accuracy. However, existing methods either use some unsupervised feature encoding methods or based on feature aggregation methods to aggregate multi -scale convolutional features, ignoring the information redundancy and semantic ambiguity between of them. To address the above-mentioned limitations, an end-to-end multi-scale feature aggregation network (MSF A) based on channel-spatial attention module is proposed to learn discriminative scene representation for remote sensing scene classification. The experimental results on the aerial image data set (AID) demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive classification performance compared with other state-of-the-art methods.
Ming Li 0066, Lin Lei, Xiao Li 0017, Yuli Sun
IGARSS4
2021 Nonlocal patch similarity based heterogeneous remote sensing change detection
Yuli Sun, Lin Lei, Xiao Li 0017, Hao Sun 0042, Gangyao Kuang
Pattern Recognit.1
2021 Sparse signal recovery via infimal convolution based penalty
Lin Lei, Yuli Sun, Xiao Li 0017
Signal Process. Image Commun.2
2021 Collaborative Attention-Based Heterogeneous Gated Fusion Network for Land Cover Classification
abstract
Existing land cover classification methods mostly rely on either the optical or synthetic aperture radar (SAR) features alone, which ignore the mutual complementary effects between optical and SAR sources. In this article, we compare the distribution histograms of deep semantic features extracted from optical and SAR modalities within land cover categories, which intuitively demonstrates that there are the large complementary potentials between the optical and SAR features. Therefore, we propose a novel collaborative attention-based heterogeneous gated fusion network (CHGFNet), which hierarchically fuses both optical and SAR features for land cover classification. More specifically, the CHGFNet consists of three main components: two-stream feature extractor, multimodal collaborative attention module (MCAM), and the gated heterogeneous fusion module (GHFM). Given optical and SAR patch pairs, two-stream feature extractor introduces multistage feature learning methodology to acquire discriminative optical and SAR features. Then, to explore the inherent complementarity between optical and SAR features, MCAM is embedded into CHGFNet, which provides an efficient stage to capture the correlation between optical and SAR features by jointly calculating the collaborative attention in joint feature space. Finally, to automatically learn the varying contributions of both optical and SAR features for classifying different land categories, GHFM is used to fuse both optical and SAR features. Extensive comparative evaluations demonstrate the advantages of CHGFNet within land cover classification over the state-of-the-art methods on three co-registered optical and SAR data sets.
Xiao Li 0017, Lin Lei, Yuli Sun, Ming Li 0066, Gangyao Kuang
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.3
2021 SAR Image Speckle Reduction Based on Nonconvex Hybrid Total Variation Model
abstract
Speckle noise inherent in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images seriously affects the visual effect and brings great difficulties to the postprocessing of the SAR image. Due to the edge-preserving feature, total variation (TV) regularization-based techniques have been extensively utilized to reduce the speckle. However, the strong scatters in SAR image with radiometry several orders of magnitude larger than their surrounding regions limit the effectiveness of TV regularization. Meanwhile, the ℓ1-norm first-order TV regularization sometimes causes staircase artifacts as it favors solutions that are piecewise constant, and it usually underestimates high-amplitude components of image gradient as the ℓ1-norm uniformly penalizes the amplitude. To overcome these shortcomings, a new hybrid variation model, called Fisher-Tippett (FT) distribution-ℓp-norm first-and second-order hybrid TVs (HTpVs), is proposed to reduce the speckle after removing the strong scatters. Especially, the FT-HTpV inherits the advantages of the distribution based data fidelity term, the nonconvex regularization, and the higher order TV regularization. Therefore, it can effectively remove the speckle while preserving point scatters and edges and reducing staircase artifacts well. To efficiently solve the nonconvex minimization problem, an iterative framework with a nonmonotone-accelerated proximal gradient (nmAPG) method and a matrix-vector acceleration strategy are used. Extensive experiments on both the simulated and real SAR images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Yuli Sun, Lin Lei, Dongdong Guan, Xiao Li 0017, Gangyao Kuang
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2021 Patch Similarity Graph Matrix-Based Unsupervised Remote Sensing Change Detection With Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Sensors
abstract
Change detection (CD) of remote sensing images is an important and challenging topic, which has found a wide range of applications in many fields. In particular, one of the main challenges is to detect changes between heterogeneous images, where the difference in imaging mechanism makes it difficult to carry out a direct comparison. In this article, we propose an unsupervised CD framework based on the patch similarity graph matrix (PSGM), which assumes that the patch similarity graph structure of each homogeneous or heterogeneous image is consistent if no change occurs. First, it learns the PSGM of one image based on the self-expressive property, which can be interpreted as containing the edges of the fully connected graphs with each image patch as a vertex. Then, the change level depends on how much one image still conforms to the similarity graph structure learned from the other image. Meanwhile, the change map can be further optimized by using the prior sparse knowledge that only a small part of the image changed and most areas remain unchanged. Experiments with both homogeneous and heterogeneous data sets demonstrate the effective performance of the proposed PSGM-based CD method.
Yuli Sun, Lin Lei, Xiao Li 0017, Xiang Tan, Gangyao Kuang
IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens.1
2021 Iterative Robust Graph for Unsupervised Change Detection of Heterogeneous Remote Sensing Images
abstract
This work presents a robust graph mapping approach for the unsupervised heterogeneous change detection problem in remote sensing imagery. To address the challenge that heterogeneous images cannot be directly compared due to different imaging mechanisms, we take advantage of the fact that the heterogeneous images share the same structure information for the same ground object, which is imaging modality-invariant. The proposed method first constructs a robust K -nearest neighbor graph to represent the structure of each image, and then compares the graphs within the same image domain by means of graph mapping to calculate the forward and backward difference images, which can avoid the confusion of heterogeneous data. Finally, it detects the changes through a Markovian co-segmentation model that can fuse the forward and backward difference images in the segmentation process, which can be solved by the co-graph cut. Once the changed areas are detected by the Markovian co-segmentation, they will be propagated back into the graph construction process to reduce the influence of changed neighbors. This iterative framework makes the graph more robust and thus improves the final detection performance. Experimental results on different data sets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method. Source code of the proposed method is made available at https://github.com/yulisun/IRG-McS.
Yuli Sun, Lin Lei, Dongdong Guan, Gangyao Kuang
IEEE Trans. Image Process.1
2020 A robust recovery algorithm with smoothing strategies
Yuli Sun, Lin Lei, Xiao Li 0017, Ming Li 0066, Gangyao Kuang
Neurocomputing1
2020 Sparse optimization problem with s-difference regularization
Yuli Sun, Xiang Tan, Xiao Li 0017, Lin Lei, Gangyao Kuang
Signal Process.1
2018 Sparse signal recovery via minimax-concave penalty and ℓ 1 -norm loss function
abstract
In sparse signal recovery, to overcome the ‐norm sparse regularisation's disadvantages tendency of uniformly penalise the signal amplitude and underestimate the high‐amplitude components, a new algorithm based on a non‐convex minimax‐concave penalty is proposed, which can approximate the ‐norm more accurately. Moreover, the authors employ the ‐norm loss function instead of the ‐norm for the residual error, as the ‐loss is less sensitive to the outliers in the measurements. To rise to the challenges introduced by the non‐convex non‐smooth problem, they first employ a smoothed strategy to approximate the ‐norm loss function, and then use the difference‐of‐convex algorithm framework to solve the non‐convex problem. They also show that any cluster point of the sequence generated by the proposed algorithm converges to a stationary point. The simulation result demonstrates the authors’ conclusions and indicates that the algorithm proposed in this study can obviously improve the reconstruction quality.
Yuli Sun, Jinxu Tao
IET Signal Process.1
2015 The entropy weighted non-uniform scanning algorithm for diffraction tomography
Yuli Sun, Jinxu Tao, Conggui Liu
Sci. China Inf. Sci.1