Buildings along riverbanks are likely to be affected by rising water levels, therefore the acquisition of accurate building information has great importance not only for riverbank environmental protection but also for dealing with emergency cases like flooding. UAV-based photographs are flexible and cloud-free compared to satellite images and can provide very high-resolution images up to centimeter level, while there exist great challenges in quickly and accurately detecting and extracting building from UAV images because there are usually too many details and distortions on UAV images. In this paper, a deep learning (DL)-based approach is proposed for more accurately extracting building information, in which the network architecture, SegNet, is used in the semantic segmentation after the network training on a completely labeled UAV image dataset covering multi-dimension urban settlement appearances along a riverbank area in Chongqing. The experiment results show that an excellent performance has been obtained in the detection of buildings from untrained locations with an average overall accuracy more than 90%. To verify the generality and advantage of the proposed method, the procedure is further evaluated by training and testing with another two open standard datasets which have a variety of building patterns and styles, and the final overall accuracies of building extraction are more than 93% and 95%, respectively.

The capture of a target spacecraft by a chaser is an on-orbit docking operation that requires an accurate, reliable, and robust object recognition algorithm. Vision-based guided spacecraft relative motion during close-proximity maneuvers has been consecutively applied using dynamic modeling as a spacecraft on-orbit service system. This research constructs a vision-based pose estimation model that performs image processing via a deep convolutional neural network. The pose estimation model was constructed by repurposing a modified pretrained GoogLeNet model with the available Unreal Engine 4 rendered dataset of the Soyuz spacecraft. In the implementation, the convolutional neural network learns from the data samples to create correlations between the images and the spacecraft’s six degrees-of-freedom parameters. The experiment has compared an exponential-based loss function and a weighted Euclidean-based loss function. Using the weighted Euclidean-based loss function, the implemented pose estimation model achieved moderately high performance with a position accuracy of 92.53 percent and an error of 1.2 m. The in-attitude prediction accuracy can reach 87.93 percent, and the errors in the three Euler angles do not exceed 7.6 degrees. This research can contribute to spacecraft detection and tracking problems. Although the finished vision-based model is specific to the environment of synthetic dataset, the model could be trained further to address actual docking operations in the future.

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Abstract:Andrews first proposed an equation to visualize the structures within data in 1972. Since then, this equation has been used for data transformation and visualization in a wide variety of fields. However, it has yet to be applied to satellite image data. The effect of unwanted, or impure, pixels occurring in these data varies with their distribution in the image; the effect is greater if impurity pixels are included in a classifier's training set. Andrews' curves enable the interpreter to select outlier or impurity data that can be grouped into a new category for classification. This study overcomes the above-mentioned problem and illustrates the novelty of applying Andrews' plots to satellite image data, and proposes a robust method for classifying the plots that combines Dempster-Shafer theory with fuzzy set theory. In addition, we present an example, obtained from real satellite images, to demonstrate the application of the proposed classification method. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed method are investigated for different training set sizes and crop types, and are compared with the results of two traditional classification methods. We find that outlier data are easily eliminated by examining Andrews' curves and that the proposed method significantly outperforms traditional methods when considering the classification accuracy.