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Sébastien Lefèvre

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Published work

13 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

NOFE - Neural Operator Function Embedding

Most dimensionality reduction methods treat data as discrete point clouds, ignoring the continuous domain structure inherent to many real-world processes. To bridge this gap, we introduce Neural Operator Function Embedding (NOFE), a domain-aware framework for continuous dimensionality reduction. NOFE learns function-to-function mappings via a Graph Kernel Operator, enabling mesh-free evaluation at arbitrary query locations independent of input discretization. We establish NOFE as approximation of sheaf-to-sheaf mappings, generalizing Sheaf Neural Networks to continuous domains. We evaluate NOFE across different datasets, comparing it against PCA, t-SNE, and UMAP. Our results demonstrate that NOFE significantly outperforms baselines in local structure preservation, achieving a local Stress of 0.111 compared to 0.398 for PCA, 0.773 for t-SNE, and 0.791 for UMAP for the ERA5 climate reanalysis dataset. NOFE also exhibits robust sampling independence, reducing the Patch Stitching Error by up to $20.0\times$ relative to UMAP (59.0 vs. 267.6 under regional normalization) and ensuring consistency across disjoint domain patches. While maintaining competitive global structure preservation (Stress-1: 0.379 vs. PCA's 0.268), NOFE resolves fine-grained structures and produces smooth, consistent embeddings that generalize across varying sample densities, addressing key limitations of discrete reduction methods.

preprint2022arXiv

CroCo: Cross-Modal Contrastive learning for localization of Earth Observation data

It is of interest to localize a ground-based LiDAR point cloud on remote sensing imagery. In this work, we tackle a subtask of this problem, i.e. to map a digital elevation model (DEM) rasterized from aerial LiDAR point cloud on the aerial imagery. We proposed a contrastive learning-based method that trains on DEM and high-resolution optical imagery and experiment the framework on different data sampling strategies and hyperparameters. In the best scenario, the Top-1 score of 0.71 and Top-5 score of 0.81 are obtained. The proposed method is promising for feature learning from RGB and DEM for localization and is potentially applicable to other data sources too. Source code will be released at https://github.com/wtseng530/AVLocalization.

preprint2022arXiv

Detection of Degraded Acacia tree species using deep neural networks on uav drone imagery

Deep-learning-based image classification and object detection has been applied successfully to tree monitoring. However, studies of tree crowns and fallen trees, especially on flood inundated areas, remain largely unexplored. Detection of degraded tree trunks on natural environments such as water, mudflats, and natural vegetated areas is challenging due to the mixed colour image backgrounds. In this paper, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, with embedded RGB cameras were used to capture the fallen Acacia Xanthophloea trees from six designated plots around Lake Nakuru, Kenya. Motivated by the need to detect fallen trees around the lake, two well-established deep neural networks, i.e. Faster Region-based Convolution Neural Network (Faster R-CNN) and Retina-Net were used for fallen tree detection. A total of 7,590 annotations of three classes on 256 x 256 image patches were used for this study. Experimental results show the relevance of deep learning in this context, with Retina-Net model achieving 38.9% precision and 57.9% recall.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning Digital Terrain Models from Point Clouds: ALS2DTM Dataset and Rasterization-based GAN

Despite the popularity of deep neural networks in various domains, the extraction of digital terrain models (DTMs) from airborne laser scanning (ALS) point clouds is still challenging. This might be due to the lack of dedicated large-scale annotated dataset and the data-structure discrepancy between point clouds and DTMs. To promote data-driven DTM extraction, this paper collects from open sources a large-scale dataset of ALS point clouds and corresponding DTMs with various urban, forested, and mountainous scenes. A baseline method is proposed as the first attempt to train a Deep neural network to extract digital Terrain models directly from ALS point clouds via Rasterization techniques, coined DeepTerRa. Extensive studies with well-established methods are performed to benchmark the dataset and analyze the challenges in learning to extract DTM from point clouds. The experimental results show the interest of the agnostic data-driven approach, with sub-metric error level compared to methods designed for DTM extraction. The data and source code is provided at https://lhoangan.github.io/deepterra/ for reproducibility and further similar research.

preprint2022arXiv

TimeMatch: Unsupervised Cross-Region Adaptation by Temporal Shift Estimation

The recent developments of deep learning models that capture complex temporal patterns of crop phenology have greatly advanced crop classification from Satellite Image Time Series (SITS). However, when applied to target regions spatially different from the training region, these models perform poorly without any target labels due to the temporal shift of crop phenology between regions. Although various unsupervised domain adaptation techniques have been proposed in recent years, no method explicitly learns the temporal shift of SITS and thus provides only limited benefits for crop classification. To address this, we propose TimeMatch, which explicitly accounts for the temporal shift for improved SITS-based domain adaptation. In TimeMatch, we first estimate the temporal shift from the target to the source region using the predictions of a source-trained model. Then, we re-train the model for the target region by an iterative algorithm where the estimated shift is used to generate accurate target pseudo-labels. Additionally, we introduce an open-access dataset for cross-region adaptation from SITS in four different regions in Europe. On our dataset, we demonstrate that TimeMatch outperforms all competing methods by 11% in average F1-score across five different adaptation scenarios, setting a new state-of-the-art in cross-region adaptation.

preprint2020arXiv

BreizhCrops: A Time Series Dataset for Crop Type Mapping

We present Breizhcrops, a novel benchmark dataset for the supervised classification of field crops from satellite time series. We aggregated label data and Sentinel-2 top-of-atmosphere as well as bottom-of-atmosphere time series in the region of Brittany (Breizh in local language), north-east France. We compare seven recently proposed deep neural networks along with a Random Forest baseline. The dataset, model (re-)implementations and pre-trained model weights are available at the associated GitHub repository (https://github.com/dl4sits/BreizhCrops) that has been designed with applicability for practitioners in mind. We plan to maintain the repository with additional data and welcome contributions of novel methods to build a state-of-the-art benchmark on methods for crop type mapping.

preprint2020arXiv

GeoGraph: Learning graph-based multi-view object detection with geometric cues end-to-end

In this paper we propose an end-to-end learnable approach that detects static urban objects from multiple views, re-identifies instances, and finally assigns a geographic position per object. Our method relies on a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to, detect all objects and output their geographic positions given images and approximate camera poses as input. Our GNN simultaneously models relative pose and image evidence, and is further able to deal with an arbitrary number of input views. Our method is robust to occlusion, with similar appearance of neighboring objects, and severe changes in viewpoints by jointly reasoning about visual image appearance and relative pose. Experimental evaluation on two challenging, large-scale datasets and comparison with state-of-the-art methods show significant and systematic improvements both in accuracy and efficiency, with 2-6% gain in detection and re-ID average precision as well as 8x reduction of training time.

preprint2020arXiv

Very high resolution Airborne PolSAR Image Classification using Convolutional Neural Networks

In this work, we exploit convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for the classification of very high resolution (VHR) polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) data. Due to the significant appearance of heterogeneous textures within these data, not only polarimetric features but also structural tensors are exploited to feed CNN models. For deep networks, we use the SegNet model for semantic segmentation, which corresponds to pixelwise classification in remote sensing. Our experiments on the airborne F-SAR data show that for VHR PolSAR images, SegNet could provide high accuracy for the classification task; and introducing structural tensors together with polarimetric features as inputs could help the network to focus more on geometrical information to significantly improve the classification performance.

preprint2016arXiv

A Subpath Kernel for Learning Hierarchical Image Representations

Tree kernels have demonstrated their ability to deal with hierarchical data, as the intrinsic tree structure often plays a discriminative role. While such kernels have been successfully applied to various domains such as nature language processing and bioinformatics, they mostly concentrate on ordered trees and whose nodes are described by symbolic data. Meanwhile, hierarchical representations have gained increasing interest to describe image content. This is particularly true in remote sensing, where such representations allow for revealing different objects of interest at various scales through a tree structure. However, the induced trees are unordered and the nodes are equipped with numerical features. In this paper, we propose a new structured kernel for hierarchical image representations which is built on the concept of subpath kernel. Experimental results on both artificial and remote sensing datasets show that the proposed kernel manages to deal with the hierarchical nature of the data, leading to better classification rates.

preprint2016arXiv

Combining multiscale features for classification of hyperspectral images: a sequence based kernel approach

Nowadays, hyperspectral image classification widely copes with spatial information to improve accuracy. One of the most popular way to integrate such information is to extract hierarchical features from a multiscale segmentation. In the classification context, the extracted features are commonly concatenated into a long vector (also called stacked vector), on which is applied a conventional vector-based machine learning technique (e.g. SVM with Gaussian kernel). In this paper, we rather propose to use a sequence structured kernel: the spectrum kernel. We show that the conventional stacked vector-based kernel is actually a special case of this kernel. Experiments conducted on various publicly available hyperspectral datasets illustrate the improvement of the proposed kernel w.r.t. conventional ones using the same hierarchical spatial features.

preprint2016arXiv

How Useful is Region-based Classification of Remote Sensing Images in a Deep Learning Framework?

In this paper, we investigate the impact of segmentation algorithms as a preprocessing step for classification of remote sensing images in a deep learning framework. Especially, we address the issue of segmenting the image into regions to be classified using pre-trained deep neural networks as feature extractors for an SVM-based classifier. An efficient segmentation as a preprocessing step helps learning by adding a spatially-coherent structure to the data. Therefore, we compare algorithms producing superpixels with more traditional remote sensing segmentation algorithms and measure the variation in terms of classification accuracy. We establish that superpixel algorithms allow for a better classification accuracy as a homogenous and compact segmentation favors better generalization of the training samples.

preprint2016arXiv

On the usability of deep networks for object-based image analysis

As computer vision before, remote sensing has been radically changed by the introduction of Convolution Neural Networks. Land cover use, object detection and scene understanding in aerial images rely more and more on deep learning to achieve new state-of-the-art results. Recent architectures such as Fully Convolutional Networks (Long et al., 2015) can even produce pixel level annotations for semantic mapping. In this work, we show how to use such deep networks to detect, segment and classify different varieties of wheeled vehicles in aerial images from the ISPRS Potsdam dataset. This allows us to tackle object detection and classification on a complex dataset made up of visually similar classes, and to demonstrate the relevance of such a subclass modeling approach. Especially, we want to show that deep learning is also suitable for object-oriented analysis of Earth Observation data. First, we train a FCN variant on the ISPRS Potsdam dataset and show how the learnt semantic maps can be used to extract precise segmentation of vehicles, which allow us studying the repartition of vehicles in the city. Second, we train a CNN to perform vehicle classification on the VEDAI (Razakarivony and Jurie, 2016) dataset, and transfer its knowledge to classify candidate segmented vehicles on the Potsdam dataset.

preprint2016arXiv

Semantic Segmentation of Earth Observation Data Using Multimodal and Multi-scale Deep Networks

This work investigates the use of deep fully convolutional neural networks (DFCNN) for pixel-wise scene labeling of Earth Observation images. Especially, we train a variant of the SegNet architecture on remote sensing data over an urban area and study different strategies for performing accurate semantic segmentation. Our contributions are the following: 1) we transfer efficiently a DFCNN from generic everyday images to remote sensing images; 2) we introduce a multi-kernel convolutional layer for fast aggregation of predictions at multiple scales; 3) we perform data fusion from heterogeneous sensors (optical and laser) using residual correction. Our framework improves state-of-the-art accuracy on the ISPRS Vaihingen 2D Semantic Labeling dataset.